A decade after its painful first attempt, Meta is quietly laying the groundwork for something that could change how billions of people move money around the world. The social media powerhouse is working toward entering the stablecoin space later this year, reaching out to outside firms to help drive digital payments across its hugely popular platforms.
Meta, the company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, has more than three billion people as active users. It now wants stablecoin-backed payments running by the second half of 2026. To get there, Meta has already knocked on the doors of several third-party providers, and sources say Stripe, the global online payments platform, sits at the top of that list. The two companies share a long history, and Stripe’s CEO Patrick Collison stepped onto Meta’s board of directors back in April 2025. Stripe also acquired stablecoin firm Bridge last year, positioning it as a strong strategic match for Meta’s ambitions.
New Wallet, Different Strategy This Time
Meta plans to bring in an outside vendor to manage payments and set up a fresh digital wallet rather than launching its stablecoin from scratch. Experts say Meta wants to tread carefully, as it already faced the collapse of its Libra project—a cross-border digital payments system—which ran into a wall of regulatory opposition and had to be stopped in early 2022.
Indeed, today’s crypto landscape is significantly different. President Donald Trump’s GENIUS Act provided U.S. stablecoin issuers with a robust legal foundation for the first time, thereby creating an opportunity for new entrants. A successful push by Meta could help it sidestep hefty banking fees, grab a slice of the cross-border payments market, and take on competitors like Elon Musk’s X and Telegram, both gunning to become super apps where users chat and pay without ever switching platforms.
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