Charles Cascarilla, CEO & Co-Founder at Paxos

Paxos wears many hats in the blockchain ecosystem. It offers one of the better known stable coins, $PAX. Operates a crypto currency exchange, that’s itBit and the company provides products that help large firms use blockchain to improve their settlement systems. But at the heart of Paxos (according to CEO Charles Cascarilla) is to move the financial system onto the blockchain — it’s a move he says could prevent future financial calamities like what the market saw in 2008. On this episode of The Scoop Cascarilla talked about the growth of its stable coin and why stable coins are a better alternative for merchants.

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Cascarilla, who has led Paxos since co-founding the company in 2012 as one of the first firms to win a New York State trust charter for digital assets, tells host Frank Chaparro that Paxos plays multiple roles in the industry, spanning its PAX stablecoin, its itBit cryptocurrency exchange, and a growing blockchain-based settlement business built for institutional clients.

The conversation lands just as Paxos was expanding its stablecoin footprint considerably: within days of this episode's release, New York regulators would sign off on Paxos issuing Binance USD, a partnership that made Paxos the issuing and custodial partner behind one of the largest exchange-branded stablecoins in the market. Cascarilla frames all of that activity around a single underlying mission: moving the traditional financial system onto blockchain rails. He argues that greater on-chain transparency and faster, programmable settlement could help prevent the kind of opacity that contributed to the 2008 financial crisis, positioning Paxos's regulated-trust model as a template for how digital assets and legacy finance can converge safely.

Much of the discussion also focuses on stablecoins specifically, with Cascarilla explaining why he sees dollar-pegged tokens as a far more practical payment rail for merchants and everyday commerce than volatile cryptocurrencies like bitcoin, and what it will take to get more retailers and payment processors comfortable settling in stablecoins rather than fiat. Cascarilla also touches on how Paxos's institutional settlement work fits alongside its consumer-facing stablecoin and exchange products, describing the three lines of business as complementary rather than competing bets on where blockchain adoption would take hold first.

He walks through why Paxos pursued a regulated trust charter from the outset instead of operating in the gray areas many crypto companies relied on at the time, arguing that working within the existing banking and securities framework, rather than around it, would prove more durable as regulators paid closer attention to the industry. The episode offers a window into how one of the industry's earliest regulated trust companies was positioning itself just as stablecoins were about to move decisively into the mainstream.