Paxos Labs

About Paxos Labs

Paxos Labs is the enterprise-grade infrastructure platform for issuing branded stablecoins and embedding on-chain financial products. The company was founded as itBit in 2012 by CEO Charles Cascarilla and Rich Teo. With a background in financial services, including co-founding Cedar Hill Capital Partners and its venture arm Liberty City Ventures, Cascarilla has focused on integrating blockchain with traditional finance.

Originally a bitcoin exchange, the company rebranded to Paxos Trust Company in 2015 after becoming the first firm to receive a limited-purpose trust charter for digital assets from the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS). This regulatory-first approach has been a core tenet of the company. Paxos holds additional licenses, including from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) and oversight from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC).

Paxos provides business-to-business services for fintechs, banks, and marketplaces. Its business model centers on providing the regulated infrastructure for other companies to offer digital asset products without bearing the full technical and regulatory burden. This includes Crypto Brokerage services, which manage custody, licensing, and trading, and asset tokenization. A key partnership is with PayPal, where Paxos technology powers the crypto brokerage services for PayPal and Venmo users. Paxos also issues PayPal's stablecoin, PYUSD. Its platform enables the issuance of custom-branded stablecoins, the deployment of DeFi yield strategies, and the management of structured digital assets. Clients can embed these products, such as yield-generating opportunities on various assets, directly into their user experiences.

In June 2025, the company launched Paxos Labs as an independently operated spin-off to focus specifically on enabling platforms to launch embedded on-chain products and make DeFi markets more accessible. This initiative, co-founded by Bhau Kotecha and Charles Cascarilla, provides APIs and modular tools to help partners create products like branded stablecoins backed by real-world assets (RWAs). Over its history, Paxos has raised over $535 million in funding from investors including Oak HC/FT, PayPal Ventures, and MercadoLibre.