Meta, the US tech giant led by Facebook creator Mark Zuckerberg, aims to enter the stablecoin space later this year, pending successful integration with a third-party firm to facilitate payments using the dollar-pegged token technology, according to three people familiar with the plans.
The tech giant, which owns Facebook, WhatsApp and Instagram and has more than 3 billion users, wants to begin its stablecoin integration early in the second half of this year, said one of the people, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the plans are not public. Meta plans to integrate a vendor to help manage stablecoin-backed payments and implement a new wallet, the person said.
Another person said Meta has sent out a request for product (RFP) to third-party firms and mentioned Stripe as a likely candidate to pilot Meta’s stablecoin.
Stripe, which acquired stablecoin specialist Bridge last year, is a long-standing partner of Meta, and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison joined Meta’s board in April 2025.
Meta, Stripe and Bridge were contacted for comment, but none responded at the time of publication.
Meta-introduction of stablecoins would let it open payment rails to its massive user base while bypassing expensive traditional bank fees and potentially position it as a global leader in “social commerce” and cross-border money transfers.
The move would also put the tech giant in direct competition with the likes of Elon Musk’s social media platform X as well as messaging platform Telegram, both of which aim to bring payments in-house by becoming “super apps.” This was one of the original goals of the planned Libra project – allowing the social media company to tap into its vast networks, including WhatsApp’s peer-to-peer messaging service and Facebook and Instagram’s networking and commerce tools, for payments.
Regulatory change
Meta famously tried to introduce the Libra stablecoin, later renamed Diem, in 2019, only to face strong headwinds due to a less favorable regulatory climate than today and a lingering reputational hit from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
In the face of a backlash against the project from US lawmakers, the Libra Association, as it was then called, scaled back its ambitions in 2020, focusing on the development of a series of stablecoins pegged to various currencies, as opposed to the original plan of a global digital currency backed by a basket of national currencies.
Ultimately, Meta’s stablecoin was never formally launched, and the project was shut down and its assets sold off in early 2022.
The regulatory climate in the US today is quite different. There are several crypto-regulatory regimes in the works, including President Donald Trump’s GENIUS Act, which for the first time established a legal basis for US stablecoin issuers and opened the floodgates to market participants with new tokens. However, the US regulators are still only in the early stages of drafting the rules for issuers.
That said, the whole Libra/Diem experience has made Meta prefer to rely on a third-party stablecoin payment provider this time, according to one of the sources.
“They want to do this, but at arm’s length,” the source said.
