PayPal today announced that its PayPal USD (PYUSD) stablecoin now runs on Solana.

In a Wednesday announcement, the payments platform said that the move would bring "significant benefits for commerce use cases."

Solana is the blockchain network behind the fifth biggest cryptocurrency by market cap, SOL. It aims to compete with Ethereum by providing a faster network for developers to build anything from games to decentralized finance (DeFi) apps.

Its unique selling point is that it is fast and cheap, so transactions can be processed settled quickly—and PayPal noted this in its announcement.

"As the most used blockchain for stablecoin transfers, according to data from blockchain analytics platform Artemis, Solana has emerged as the leading blockchain to run tokenized transactions and is ideal for PYUSD as it continues to be used for payment use cases," the announcement said.

Jose Fernandez da Ponte, PayPal's senior vice president of blockchain, crypto, and digital currency group, added: "Making PYUSD available on the Solana blockchain furthers our goal of enabling a digital currency with a stable value designed for commerce and payments."

PYUSD is a dollar-pegged stablecoin, backed by cash equivalents and short-term treasuries. PayPal launched PYUSD last year and Paxos Trust Co. issues the token. It also runs on Ethereum.

A stablecoin is a type of digital asset pegged to something stable—usually fiat currencies like the dollar. The idea with a stablecoin is that crypto users can keep assets on a blockchain, but they will not jump up and down in price as much as other assets, like Bitcoin.

Users are already able to buy the stablecoin on top exchanges including Crypto.com, Coinbase, and Kraken.

Edited by Andrew Hayward