Reimagining global payroll with Toku
Max Segall
|May 13, 2025
Stablecoins improve traditional money movement flows by making them faster, cheaper, and dollar-denominated by default. It’s hard to imagine a market that stands to be impacted more positively than the payroll market, which processes trillions of dollars of value globally each year.
Toku helps employees and contractors across 150+ countries get paid on stablecoin rails. With Privy, anyone with an email address can get paid onchain via Toku, with the right withholding taxes paid, and integrates with traditional payroll companies like ADP, Workday and Rippling. Let’s dive in.
How international payroll works on fiat rails
To illustrate how much of a difference Toku makes, let’s walk through a status-quo cross-border employee payroll funds flow on fiat rails:
Company initiates payroll funding (e.g., $2,000/biweekly) to employer of record partner ($10-25 bank fee)
[1-3 days later] Employer of record receives dollar balance (1-2% payroll fee)
[1 day later] Employer of record converts USD to local currency (2-5% FX fee)
[1-7 days later] Employer of record sends local currency payment to recipient ($0-5 payment fee)
In practice, this means recipients lose out on ~5% of their paycheck value and get paid ~1 week later than they need to. Given many contractors live paycheck-to-paycheck, this payroll cost and speed inefficiencies lead to some serious life tradeoffs for millions of recipients.
With crypto rails, Toku is unlocking a structurally better alternative.
Payroll with Toku
Toku allows international employees to get paid same-day in dollar denominated value at a fraction of the cost.
Here’s how it works:
Company initiates payroll funding (e.g., $2,000/biweekly) to Toku (<$0.01 blockchain transaction fee)
[Same day if paid via stablecoins] Toku receives payment (standard payroll fee)
Toku sends payroll to recipient in dollar denominated value (<$0.01 transaction fee)
Privy provisions self-custodial wallets for recipients to receive balance, and offramp from there when ready
Since the majority of global contractors don’t have existing crypto wallets, Toku leverages Privy to provision user-controlled wallets under the hood to receive payments. All of the crypto interactions are completely behind the scenes, presented as dollar-denominated value. This is particularly valuable, given recipients in countries with unstable currencies often prefer to get paid in dollars, and offramp to their local fiat bank accounts when they’re ready to spend the balance.
In short, when you manage payroll with Toku, you get:
Faster payouts - funds arrive same day to recipients
Lower cost - paying onchain foregoes standard bank and FX fees
Dollar denominated value - recipients get paid in dollars vs. unstable local currency
Dollar savings - users can hold balance in their wallets and earn yield until they’re ready to spend the funds
Where we go from here
Toku has already facilitated hundreds of millions of dollars worth of stablecoin payroll, and they’re just getting started.
Given balances are held as stablecoin, contractors can start earning yield on their balance, provision cards to spend the balance anywhere supported via major card networks like Visa and MasterCard, and natively offramp to local fiat accounts in more countries.
In hindsight, managing cross-border payment flows on crypto rails will be obvious. We’re proud to support the Toku team as they lead the way to make these benefits accessible to everyone.
