Beluga Review: Toku Payroll
By Will McKinnon Updated November 17, 2025
Summary
- Toku is an excellent choice for crypto-native companies looking to offer their employees the perk of getting paid in crypto. It’s also great for paying international employees, contractors or vendors.
- Toku has integrated with many of the leading payroll providers like ADP, Workday, Gusto and Rippling to make the process as simple as possible for both employees and employers.
For many years, the crypto community felt that getting part of their salary in Bitcoin or other cryptos was the easiest way to obtain crypto and would lead to mass adoption. Unfortunately, this never became a reality because there was no way to seamlessly integrate crypto payments into the traditional payroll companies. Companies like Coinbase and BitPay made their own inhouse solutions which allowed their employees to reap the benefits of getting paid in crypto for many years. Now, Toku finally has a product that allows companies to offer crypto payroll without having to change their payroll provider and sink resources into a one off solution.
Toku was founded in 2022 by Ken O'Friel and Dominika Stobiecka, and has raised $20M in funding led by Blockchain Capital to build out their platform. Whereas crypto payroll is typically complicated in practice, Toku has integrated with several partners including Workday and Gusto to making it easy even for non-crypto native teams to pay in stablecoins. They have several hundred customers including Filecoin, Hedera, Paxos, and Elliptic.
Pros & Cons
Pros & Cons
Overview
Overview
Toku finally allows crypto companies to “Eat their own dogfood” by allowing companies to pay their employees in crypto while using their traditional payroll provider. Employees can choose how much of their weekly payroll they want to get paid in their favorite crypto. This essentially allows the employee to dollar cost average their favorite tokens over a long period. This also eliminates the need from buying from exchanges as the tokens are delivered to your crypto wallet every pay cycle.
Toku also successfully addresses major pain points for employers dealing in cross-border payroll with instant settlement and significant cost savings. Companies in the Web3 world typically employ people all around the world, many of which prefer to take payment in something other than their own national currency due to inflation rates, which makes a solution like Toku not only appealing but necessary.
Beluga Review
Beluga Review
Toku is an excellent choice for crypto-native companies who want to offer this perk to their employees. It’s also great for their international payment needs, offering instant settlement and half the fees of traditional providers. A recent partnership with Rain expands the Toku ecosystem by combining a giant of traditional payment systems with an innovative stablecoin-based platform, allowing employees to spend their stablecoin salaries directly via Visa and Mastercard networks at 150M+ merchants. Further improving the user experience are their integrations with existing payroll providers like ADP, Gusto, Workday and Rippling, which make it easy to connect your existing solution to Toku without needing to migrate everything. Demand for stablecoins continues to rise with over $300B in stablecoins now in issuance, and Toku is well-positioned to lead the future of payroll domestically as well as internationally.
Interested in learning more about Toku? Follow them on X or visit their website here.
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