About Paxos
Paxos is a regulated financial institution building infrastructure to enable movement between physical and digital assets. Technical briefing provided by Zach Kwartler.
Overview of briefing
00:00 – 2:25
Zach Kwartler oversees the cash and crypto business lines at Paxos. Paxos provides API-based solutions to help mainstream financial firms launch their own branded digital dollar or integrate crypto trading into their applications. Over the next two decades, there’s going to be a massive migration where the majority of the world assets will be moved from closed ledgers to public blockchains. Companies will need a regulated custodial platform to partner with in order for companies to take advantage of that evolution.
Something that is different about the Paxos approach is that the company is tokenizing and mobilizing assets cryptocurrency, cash, commodities, and securities. This enables Paxos to be a one stop shop for companies needing to store these assets. Zach walked through an example of Ben sending $1M dollars to Paxos. That could be done via wire, ACH, or Silvergate. Paxos would take those assets, mint them as US dollar backed tokens or stable coins onto the Ethereum blockchain. They could then be sent to anyone all over the world, or held and redeemed at a later point in time.
2:25 – 4:15
Front end UI demonstration of how Paxos is powering the most recent Paypal offering which allows end users to purchase cryptocurrency. The Paypal offering allows end users to see the current price of Bitcoin, Ethereum, Litecoin, and Bitcoin Cash.
After viewing the price, an end user can instantly purchase a cryptocurrency in the Paypal application powered by Paxos. This allows Paypal users to buy Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies while leveraging the Paxos infrastructure that handles the trades and underlying management of the cryptocurrency purchase.
4:15 – 7:00
Demonstration of the API calls that Paypal or any other partner would make to Paxos to show end users price and support a cryptocurrency purchase.
A postman library was used to demonstrate historical price charts, the buy and sell prices, and the purchase of the bitcoin to be executed via the API. The workflow ends with a purchase, price paid, and confirmation.
7:00 – 9:30
Zach from Paxos switched over to the Paxos treasury offering administration that supports the Paypal cryptocurrency offering. The process is used to facilitate the settlement between multiple cryptocurrency blockchains where Paxos is holding or tokenizing assets and Fiat currencies.
This is an important part of demonstrating how Paxos backs every tokenized asset on the blockchains it supports. The trading workflows and additional testing can be done for free in the Paxos Sandbox.
Additional Briefing Information
This briefing was held at V-Sum_Two on November 17, 2020. V-Sum_Two was financially supported and made possible by Modern Treasury and The Kauffman Foundation.