U.S. tech giant Meta, led by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, aims to enter the stablecoin space later this year, pending a successful integration with a third-party company to facilitate payments using 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, hopes to start integrating stablecoins as early as the second half of this year, one of the people said, asking not to be identified because the plans are private. Meta plans to integrate vendors to help manage stablecoin-backed payments and implement new wallets, the people said.
The second person said Meta sent out a request for product (RFP) to third-party companies and named Stripe as a likely candidate to pilot Meta’s stablecoin.
Stripe, which acquired stablecoin specialist Bridge last year, is a long-time partner of Meta, and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison joined Meta’s board in April 2025.
We reached out to Meta, Stripe, and Bridge for comment, but none responded as of press time.
By launching its own stablecoin, Meta could open up payment rails to a large user base while avoiding expensive traditional banking fees, potentially establishing itself as a global leader in “social commerce” and cross-border remittances.
The move also puts the tech giant in direct competition with the likes of Elon Musk’s social media platform X and messaging platform Telegram. Both companies aim to bring payments internally by becoming “super apps.” This was one of the original goals of the planned Libra project, which was to allow social media companies to leverage their vast network for payments, including WhatsApp’s peer-to-peer messaging service, Facebook and Instagram’s networks and commerce tools.
Regulatory transition
Meta famously attempted to introduce the Libra stablecoin (later renamed Diem) in 2019, only to face strong headwinds due to a less favorable regulatory environment and lingering reputational damage from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Facing pushback from U.S. lawmakers against the project, the group then called the Libra Association scaled back its ambitions in 2020, pivoting to developing a number of stablecoins pegged to a variety of currencies, as opposed to initial plans for a global digital currency backed by a basket of national currencies.
In the end, the Meta stablecoin was never officially launched, the project was shut down, and the assets were sold off in early 2022.
Today’s U.S. regulatory environment is quite different. Several crypto regulatory regimes are in the works, including President Donald Trump’s GENIUS Act. This establishes legal footing for US stablecoin issuers for the first time and opens the floodgates to new token market entrants. However, U.S. regulators are only in the early stages of drafting regulations governing issuers.
That said, one of the sources said the whole Libra/Diem experience has led to Meta preferring to rely on third-party stablecoin payment providers this time around.
“They want to do this, but at arm’s length,” the source said.
