Meta, the US 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 onboard a provider to help administer stablecoin-backed payments and implement a new wallet, the person said.
A second person said Meta had sent a request for product (RFP) to third-party companies and mentioned Stripe as a likely candidate to pilot Meta’s stablecoin.
Stripe, which acquired stablecoin specialist Bridge last year, has been a long-time partner of Meta, and Stripe CEO Patrick Collison joined 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 introducing stablecoins would allow it to open payment avenues to its massive user base while bypassing 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 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.” That was one of the original goals of the planned Libra project: to allow the social media company to leverage 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 attempted to introduce the stablecoin Libra, later renamed Diem, in 2019, but faced strong headwinds from a less favorable regulatory climate than today and continued reputational damage caused by the Cambridge Analytica scandal.
Facing opposition to the project from U.S. lawmakers, the Libra Association, as it was then called, scaled back its ambitions in 2020, turning to the development of a number of stablecoins linked to different currencies, as opposed to the original plan for a global digital currency backed by a basket of national currencies.
Ultimately, Meta’s stablecoin was never officially launched, and the project was shut down and its assets sold in early 2022.
The regulatory climate in the United States today is very different. Several crypto regulatory regimes are underway, including President Donald Trump’s GENIUS Act, which for the first time established a legal basis for U.S. stablecoin issuers and opened the floodgates for market entrants with new tokens. However, U.S. regulators are still in the early stages of developing regulations governing issuers.
That said, the whole Libra/Diem experience has led Meta to prefer to rely on a stable third-party payment provider this time around, according to one of the sources.
“They want to do it, but independently,” the source said.
