Meta Platforms’ possible use of stablecoins across its social media apps would blaze a wider trail for cryptocurrency amid a new U.S. regulatory environment, analysts said.

The owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp is experimenting with stablecoin payments within its ecosystem for a possible introduction later this year, the crypto news site CoinDesk and Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing people familiar with the company’s plans.

The trial is small and will use existing stablecoins, Bloomberg reported Tuesday, citing a person familiar with Meta’s plans. The company has no plans for its own stablecoin, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone wrote Tuesday in a post on X.

“This is about enabling people and businesses to make payments on our platforms using their preferred method,” Stone wrote. A Meta spokesperson on Wednesday referred to Stone’s post and said the company had nothing to add.

Meta “operates communications networks so it’s very natural for them to want to add a payments network,” said Jim Angel, an associate professor at Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. His academic work includes payment systems and cryptocurrencies.

The most probable stablecoin use case for Meta would be WhatsApp-enabled payments in underbanked markets, Maghnus Mareneck, the co-CEO of blockchain technology company Cosmos Labs, said Wednesday in an email.

“WhatsApp is the payments Trojan horse in emerging markets across India, Brazil, and Southeast Asia, where hundreds of millions of people conduct daily commerce but remain underserved by traditional banking,” Mareneck wrote. “Layered on top of that are creator payouts across Instagram and Facebook, in-app commerce, and peer-to-peer transfers that currently bleed value through legacy remittance corridors, charging fees that stablecoins would make look absurd.”

Meta has sent a “request for product” to third parties that work with stablecoins, and Stripe is a candidate for some work in the project, CoinDesk reported, citing a source familiar with the effort.

Stripe Chief Executive Patrick Collison became a Meta director last year. In 2024, Stripe bought Bridge, a fintech that helps companies accept stablecoins for payment and transfer money between countries. 

Stripe did not respond to an email Wednesday seeking comment.

For a large tech company like Meta, “the clearest strategic wedge” in stablecoin use would be for “creator and contractor payouts where fees, [foreign exchange] friction, and settlement delays still create real pain” across borders, said Josh Istas, head of product for The Strawhecker Group, a financial services consulting firm.

Combining payments within social networks is “an attractive idea” but carries challenges, said Aaron Press, research director for the analytics firm IDC Global. Meta – with 3.58 billion average daily users in December 2025 – commands a large audience, he noted. 

“But presence is not the same as adoption, and outside of a small handful of markets, combining social payments with social interaction has been a tough sell,” Press wrote Wednesday in an email. “Stablecoins don’t fundamentally change this.”

Meta’s stablecoin experimentation is occurring four years after the company, formerly known as Facebook, shuttered a digital currency project called Libra, and later Diem, due to regulatory resistance. 

Among its then-critics was President Donald Trump, who tweeted in July 2019 that he was “not a fan” of cryptocurrencies and that Facebook should seek a banking charter if it wanted to act as a bank. Since then, Trump and his family enterprise have embraced cryptocurrencies and he signed the Genius Act into law in July to provide a regulatory framework for stablecoin use.

Last May, Stripe President John Collison and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg spoke about the challenges of cross-border payments. Zuckerberg praised Stripe’s approach to money movement and its Bridge acquisition. John Collison is Patrick Collison’s brother and the two co-founded the company.

“Sending money to people across country lines is surprisingly, crazily difficult,” Zuckerberg said during the public conversation at a Stripe Sessions event, discussing the origins of Meta’s Libra project. “We’re not a financial services company but it just seems like this thing is so broken that someone needs to build a stablecoin and the thing that needs to exist is it needs to have a certain amount of scale to become a standard.”

He added that Stripe’s approach to international money movement “makes a lot of sense to me.”

“Honestly, what you’re doing makes much more sense than what we were doing,” Zuckerberg said. “I think you guys are probably the much better company to do this than we would have been and I’m glad it’s happening.” 

“Hopefully, there’s some collabs in the future,” Collison replied.

Stablecoin payment volume doubled last year to about $400 billion, Stripe’s co-founders wrote Tuesday in their annual letter. “Stablecoin payments are advancing quietly and inexorably as real-world uptake continues apace,” the Collisons wrote.

The larger importance of Meta adopting stablecoin use is “the broader signal it sends” as the U.S. regulatory system embraces the digital asset, Mareneck said. 

“Stablecoins have quietly gone from being a crypto-native workaround to becoming the default rails institutions are building on,” he wrote. “When a company the size of Meta decides that stablecoins are the right payment infrastructure for its ecosystem, it fundamentally reshapes the conversation about where this technology belongs in fintech.”