YouTube will allow creators on its video platform to receive earnings in PayPal’s U.S. dollar-denominated stablecoin, PYUSD, expanding the use of the cryptocurrency within mainstream digital payments, PayPal told Fortune on Thursday.
May Zabaneh, PayPal’s head of crypto, confirmed the arrangement and said the feature is already live for creators in the United States. A spokesperson for Google, which owns YouTube, said the platform had added payouts in PYUSD but declined to provide further details.
YouTube is an existing customer of PayPal and uses the company’s payouts service, a tool that helps large enterprises pay gig workers and contractors. PayPal enabled stablecoin payouts for all recipients early in the third quarter, and YouTube subsequently opted to extend the feature to its creator base, Zabaneh said.
Creators on YouTube earn a share of revenue from ads and other monetisation tools on the platform. Offering payouts in PYUSD gives those users the option to receive earnings in a crypto-linked instrument without YouTube itself having to handle digital assets directly, Zabaneh said.
“The beauty of what we’ve built is that YouTube doesn’t have to touch crypto, and so we can help take away that complexity,” she said.
PYUSD, issued by crypto firm Paxos and backed 1:1 by U.S. dollar deposits and cash equivalents, was launched by PayPal in 2023 in a push to expand the use of stablecoins in consumer payments.
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