Meta has begun offering USDC payouts to select creators on its platforms in Colombia and the Philippines through Stripe's Link wallet, marking the largest-scale stablecoin payment deployment by any Big Tech company and signaling a full-circle return to crypto five years after Libra's regulatory death.
Meta has begun offering USDC payouts to select creators on its platforms in Colombia and the Philippines through Stripe's Link wallet, marking the largest-scale stablecoin payment deployment by any Big Tech company and signaling a full-circle return to crypto five years after Libra's regulatory death.
Meta — the $1.2 trillion company behind Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp — has started paying content creators in Circle's USDC stablecoin, according to a CoinDesk report published April 29. The feature is live for a limited group of creators in Colombia and the Philippines, who can link a crypto wallet and receive earnings on Solana or Polygon.
Stripe is providing the payment infrastructure through its Link product. Stripe's head of Link, Jay Shah, confirmed the partnership publicly: "Businesses can now send stablecoin payouts directly to customers using Link. We're already partnering with Meta so their creators can receive stablecoins in their Link wallets."
This is not a pilot or a whitepaper. Creators are receiving real money in real wallets on real blockchains. The initial scope is limited to two countries, but Meta's track record with product rollouts — from Reels to Stories to Marketplace — follows a consistent pattern: test in emerging markets, then scale globally.
The move comes exactly five years after Meta (then Facebook) was forced to shut down its Libra stablecoin project amid fierce regulatory pushback from Congress, the Treasury Department, and European regulators. This time, Meta isn't issuing its own token. It's using existing regulated infrastructure (USDC via Stripe) on public chains (Solana, Polygon) — a fundamentally different, and much more regulatory-friendly, approach.
This is the stablecoin adoption moment the industry has been waiting for — not from a crypto-native company, but from a platform that touches half the planet.
Meta's 3 billion users is a distribution channel no crypto company can match. Even if only 1% of creators eventually opt into USDC payouts, that's millions of people holding stablecoins in wallets for the first time. And unlike Libra in 2019, Meta isn't trying to create a new currency or challenge sovereign monetary policy. It's using USDC — already regulated, already widely adopted, already integrated with traditional banking rails through Circle.
The Stripe partnership is the hidden infrastructure play. Stripe isn't just processing payments; they're building the wallet layer (Link) that could become the default on-ramp for stablecoin payments across the internet. If Meta's creator program scales, Stripe's Link becomes the PayPal of stablecoins — the wallet UI that abstracts away chain selection, gas fees, and private key management.
The timing is not coincidental. On the exact same day, Visa announced its stablecoin settlement network hit $7 billion in annualized volume across 9 blockchains, up 50% in a single quarter. The two stories together tell a clear narrative: the payments infrastructure layer (Stripe, Visa) and the distribution layer (Meta) are converging on stablecoins simultaneously. This is what institutional adoption actually looks like — not ETF inflows, but payment rails.
Also worth noting: the choice of Solana and Polygon is deliberate. Solana for speed and low fees (sub-second finality, fractions of a cent). Polygon for Ethereum ecosystem compatibility. These aren't random chains — they're the two most purpose-built for payments at scale. And the fact that Meta chose not to build its own chain (as it did with Libra's planned Move language and Novi wallet) shows how much the industry has matured. Build on what works. Don't reinvent the wheel.
| Timeline | Meta & Crypto |
|---|---|
| June 2019 | Libra whitepaper released — plans for global stablecoin |
| Oct 2019 | Congressional hearings, regulatory backlash |
| Dec 2020 | Libra rebranded to Diem, scaled back ambitions |
| Jan 2022 | Diem sold to Silvergate, project shut down |
| Feb 2026 | Reports emerge Meta planning stablecoin comeback via third parties |
| Apr 29, 2026 | Meta launches USDC creator payouts in Colombia & Philippines via Stripe |
The trajectory from "build our own currency" (2019) to "use existing stablecoins on existing chains via existing payment processors" (2026) is the story of crypto maturation in a single company arc. Meta learned the lesson the hard way: don't fight regulators on currency issuance. Use regulated stablecoins as a payment method instead.
The geographic choices — Colombia and Philippines — are strategic. Both have:
This gives Meta a regulatory sandbox to prove the model works before expanding to the U.S., EU, and other markets where crypto regulation is more complex but the CLARITY Act and MiCA are creating clearer frameworks.
SpaceX's S-1 filing with the SEC discloses 18,712 bitcoin on its balance sheet at $1.45B fair value, purchased for just $661M. The company targets a $1.75T valuation in what could be the largest IPO in history.
Sen. Elizabeth Warren sent a formal letter to OCC Comptroller Jonathan Gould arguing that nine national trust bank charters issued to crypto firms—including Coinbase, Circle, Ripple, Fidelity, and BitGo—violate the National Bank Act and pose 'serious risks' to the U.S. banking system.
Billionaire investor Bill Ackman announced Friday that Pershing Square has built a new position in Microsoft starting in February, arguing the company's massive AI investments aren't reflected in its slumping share price. The stake will be disclosed in regulatory filings later today.