For the first time, the New York State Department of Financial Services (NYDFS) recently issued a “greenlist” of tokens that are pre-approved for its virtual currency licensees to custody and list for trading. All three Paxos-issued tokens—the dollar-backed stablecoins Paxos Standard (PAX) and Binance USD (BUSD, white-labelled for our partner Binance), as well as our gold-backed token PAX Gold (PAXG)—are on the list. Inclusion on this greenlist validates the tremendous time, energy, and expense that Paxos puts into compliance.
As the Chief Compliance Officer at Paxos, I’m proud that the culture of Paxos is truly centered around compliance. We build products that the world has never seen before, and we build them for the innovators in the space, not the bad actors. Our engineers and product managers prioritize compliance as we create new products, our business development team considers compliance as we structure new partnerships, our operations team helps onboard and service customers according to our high compliance standards, our information security team ensures we hold our customers’ digital assets and personal information in the most secure way possible — the list goes on.
Paxos takes this compliance-first approach not just because keeping our platform safe from financial crime is the right thing to do, but also because it is required and expected by our regulators. As a trust company chartered by the NYDFS, Paxos is required to submit all products and services for a rigorous review process by the NYDFS. This ensures that we are protecting our customers, controlling for the risk of financial crime, and maintaining safety and soundness as a financial institution. All Paxos-issued digital assets were subject to this NYDFS scrutiny and received the regulator’s explicit approval. This means that Paxos as a company, along with our tokens and all the dollar and gold reserves backing our tokens, are subject to the close and ongoing supervision of our regulators. Our customers can feel secure in the knowledge that their assets are safe. And regulatory supervision means they don’t need to take our word for it—they know someone else is checking on us. We believe this security for our customers and users offers Paxos tokens a competitive advantage over tokens and products that have no oversight.
At Paxos, we are proud to be a compliance-first company, and we appreciate the recognition of our regulators by including our tokens on the NYDFS greenlist.
If you’ve read this far, you may be interested in contributing to our culture of compliance. Please take a look at our open compliance and legal positions at Paxos and consider joining us!