Stablecoins can help businesses turn costs into revenue, but not everyone needs to issue a token:

Stablecoins, the $300 billion class of digital dollars, may have started as a faster way to move money across the globe, but companies are now asking a different question: what can they actually do with them?

That shift is driving a new phase of adoption, according to Chunda McCain, co-founder of Paxos Labs, who says the industry is moving beyond basic infrastructure toward real business use cases.

“The first step was getting a stablecoin,” McCain said in an interview with CoinDesk. “The next question is: what now?”

Last week, Paxos Labs underscored that direction by raising $12 million in a strategic funding round led by Blockchain Capital, with participation from Robot Ventures, Maelstrom and Uniswap. The lab unit was incubated under Paxos, the New York-based digital asset firm behind popular stablecoins such as PayPal’s PYUSD (PYUSD) and the Global Dollar (USDG). Paxos itself builds stablecoins and the immediate underlying infrastructure, while Paxos Labs intends to build tooling for further use of those stablecoins.

With the fresh funds, Paxos Labs is building what it calls a “financial utility stack” that lets companies turn digital assets into products through a single integration.

Its newly launched Amplify Suite bundles three core tools: Earn, which offers yield on digital assets; Borrow, which enables lending against them; and Mint, which supports branded stablecoin issuance. The idea behind that is to let firms integrate tokens into a business, then layer on capabilities over time.

Turning cost into revenue

For years, enterprise crypto adoption focused on “first-touch” capabilities like trading, custody or issuing a stablecoin. Those steps opened the door but rarely generated returns on their own, according to McCain

“Stablecoins [have been] loss leaders for years,” he said.

The opportunity lies in how those assets are used. Payments are a clear example: merchants typically give up 2% to 3% in fees, while stablecoin rails can reduce those costs and even generate yield on balances held onchain.

“You turn what has always been a cost into revenue,” he said.

Some of the more novel use cases sit at the intersection of payments and credit. Payment providers already track merchant revenues and cash flow, which puts them in a position to underwrite loans, McCain argued.

That could allow merchants to access financing based on real-time performance, while earning yield on incoming payments and settling instantly across borders. These models are still early, but the building blocks are starting to come together, he said.

Not every firm needs its own token

To capture these benefits, not every firm needs its own stablecoin.

While companies like PayPal have launched branded tokens to control payments and margins, issuing one requires significant investment in liquidity, compliance and distribution.

“If you just need the economics, you don’t need to build your own,” McCain said.

Many firms can instead integrate existing stablecoins and still benefit from lower costs and added yield.

The shift may lack the hype when big firms like Western Union announce their own token, but it carries tangible impact on how businesses operate.

Stablecoins are starting to reshape margins, unlock credit and change how money moves globally, especially where traditional systems remain costly or slow.

“It might sound boring, but this is the math,” McCain said.