Meta, the American tech giant led by Facebook creator 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, 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 provider to help manage stablecoin-backed payments and implement a new wallet, the person said.
A second person said that Meta sent a request for product (RFP) to third-party companies and mentioned Stripe as a possible candidate to test Meta’s stablecoin.
Stripe, which acquired stablecoin specialist Bridge last year, is a long-time partner of Meta, with Stripe CEO Patrick Collison joining Meta’s board of directors in April 2025.
Meta, Stripe and Bridge were contacted for comment, but none responded at the time of publication.
Meta’s introduction of stablecoins would allow it to open payment avenues to its huge user base, while avoiding costly traditional banking fees, and potentially position it as a global leader in “social commerce” and cross-border remittances.
The move would also put the tech giant in direct competition with companies such as 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: to allow the social media company to leverage its vast networks, including the peer-to-peer messaging service WhatsApp and the business and networking tools of Facebook and Instagram, to make payments.
Regulatory change
Meta attempted to introduce the Libra stablecoin, later renamed Diem, in 2019, only to face strong headwinds due to a less favorable regulatory climate than the current one and a lingering reputational hit from the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Faced with rejection of the project by US lawmakers, the Libra Association, as it was then called, scaled back its ambitions in 2020, focusing on developing a series of stablecoins pegged to different currencies, as opposed to the original plan for a global digital currency backed by a basket of national currencies.
In the end, the Meta stablecoin was never formally launched, the project was shut down and its assets were sold in early 2022.
The regulatory climate in the United States today is quite different. There are several crypto regulatory regimes in place, including President Donald Trump’s GENIUS Act, which, for the first time, established a legal foundation for US stablecoin issuers and opened the floodgates for market participants with new tokens. However, US regulators are still in the early stages of drafting regulations governing issuers.
That said, the entire Libra/Diem experience has led Meta to prefer to rely on a third-party stablecoin payments provider this time around, according to one of the sources.
“They want to do this, but from a distance,” the source said.
