Translated by: Block unicorn

In July 2019, Mark Zuckerberg attended a Senate Banking Committee hearing, trying to explain why Facebook should be allowed to create a global currency. The outcome was less than ideal. Senators compared Libra to a "9/11 level threat." Regulatory authorities in France and Germany announced they would completely block Libra. The Federal Reserve Chairman also labeled it a "serious concern." Within three months, PayPal, Visa, Mastercard, eBay, and Stripe all withdrew from the Libra Association. By 2022, the project was completely abandoned, and its assets were sold to a small bank in California for $182 million.

Seven years later, Meta plans to introduce stablecoins to WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram. The initiative is expected to launch in the second half of 2026. Stripe, the company that exited the Libra project in 2019, is now the frontrunner providing technical support. So far, Washington has issued little comment.

What Meta wants has not changed; only everything else has.

It is necessary to accurately distinguish what Libra actually is because the 2026 version is different, and this difference is significant.

Libra aimed to create a new global currency. It was intended to be backed by a basket of sovereign currencies, managed by a private consortium, and issued on a proprietary blockchain. Facebook wanted to create real money, not just a payment method or settlement layer. This new type of currency would be controlled by a private alliance, of which Facebook was the most influential member. Before any central bank had a chance to figure out how to respond, this currency was already circulating among 2 billion users.

Regulators stifled this possibility. They feared that an entity the size of Facebook, if able to bypass the existing regulatory framework to issue currency to 2 billion users, would pose an unprecedented threat to monetary sovereignty. The panic in Congress was somewhat overblown, but its fundamental concerns were not unfounded.

Meta's plans for 2026, however, are exactly the opposite. The company has no intention of issuing its own stablecoin but has instead issued a request for proposals to third-party providers. As Meta spokesperson Andy Stone stated, its goal is "to enable individuals and businesses to pay on our platform in their preferred way." Meta is not trying to be the issuer but rather to provide the payment interface.

This distinction may sound small, but it is not. Issuing currency means controlling monetary policy, managing reserves, dealing with central banks, and becoming a regulated financial institution in every jurisdiction where the currency circulates. Being an interface means building wallets and connecting to other regulated entities that have already issued, supported, and received regulatory approval for stablecoins. Compliance responsibility shifts from Meta to Circle, Paxos, or any winning bidder. Meta gains allocation rights without bearing any responsibility.

David Marcus, who initially led the Libra team, stated that the project took years to adjust its design and address regulatory issues, but ultimately got blocked due to political pressure rather than a specific legal veto.

Ironically, this political pressure led to the signing of the GENIUS Act in July 2025, which created a federal framework for stablecoin issuers in the U.S. This act mandates that stablecoins hold a 1:1 ratio of high-quality asset reserves, legalizing stablecoins as a tokenized form of cash and providing the regulatory clarity needed for large corporations. In other words, those who stifled Libra created the conditions for the emergence of the 2026 version of Libra in the following five years.

The list of partners is also important.

In October 2024, Stripe acquired the stablecoin infrastructure company Bridge for $1.1 billion. In February 2026, Bridge received conditional approval from the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) for a national trust bank charter, allowing it to operate as a regulated entity for stablecoin issuance and custody services within a clear federal framework. Stripe CEO Patrick Collison joined Meta's board in April 2025. The institutional ties between the two companies are now very close, so it should come as no surprise to those who have been following developments in this space that Stripe is designated as the infrastructure provider for Meta's stablecoin integration.

This is what "keeping distance" looks like in reality. Meta is responsible for the user experience of nearly 4 billion monthly active users. Stripe and Bridge handle custody, compliance, funding inflows and outflows, and cross-chain settlements. Regardless of which blockchain is ultimately used, for users receiving creator payouts or sending money to others on Instagram, the blockchain itself—though I hate this term—remains "invisible." This is precisely what makes the adoption prospects interesting.

Industry insiders have long measured the popularity of cryptocurrency by wallet addresses and the number of exchange registrations, finding that the adoption group remains limited to those already familiar with cryptocurrency. This measure assumes that adoption refers to people actively choosing to use cryptocurrency. However, the concept Meta is building suggests that adoption means people use cryptocurrency without making an active choice because it is built into the applications they use daily.

The truly meaningful use cases here are both specific and unobtrusive. Creator earnings: Meta currently pays earnings to creators in dozens of countries through traditional banking systems, which is slow, costly, and often inaccessible in markets with weak financial infrastructure. In December 2025, YouTube allowed U.S. creators to receive earnings in PayPal's stablecoin PYUSD. PayPal handles currency conversion in the background. Creators can see the corresponding amount in their wallets. The architecture Meta is building operates on the same logic but scales up fourfold, addressing the needs of markets where bypassing traditional banking systems is far more urgent than in the U.S.

Cross-border remittances: WhatsApp has a daily open rate of up to 84% in many emerging markets. It is a primary communication tool for small businesses in regions like India, Brazil, Nigeria, and Southeast Asia. Embedding dollar payment functionality into a tool that users open 30 times a day is completely different from asking them to download a crypto wallet.

All articles about Meta’s stablecoin integration may compare it to X Money, but be cautious about what this comparison actually reveals.

Since acquiring Twitter in 2022, Elon Musk has hinted at the platform X launching payment features. He indicated that X would roll out payment services by mid-2024, but did not deliver. In February 2026, Musk confirmed in an internal demo at xAI that X Money is undergoing closed testing among X employees, with a limited external rollout expected within one to two months. Through a campaign by William Shatner, the beta functionality includes peer-to-peer transfers, a 6% annual interest on deposits via Cross River Bank, up to $250,000 FDIC insurance, and an X-branded debit card with cashback features. Despite years of speculation about Dogecoin integration, the current beta does not show any support for cryptocurrency.

Let's see how it compares to Meta. X Money, at least in its current form, is building a new type of internet bank. High-yield savings, debit cards, direct deposits, FDIC insurance—these are features of a bank account, and they just happen to exist within a social media application. This may be feasible. But it operates within the existing financial system, leveraging traditional banking infrastructure through payment channels with Cross River Bank and Visa. X is looking for solutions for the U.S. retail banking market.

Meta is addressing a different problem. The integration of stablecoins aims to serve markets where traditional banking services are too costly, too slow, or completely inaccessible. WhatsApp’s user base is primarily in developing countries. In the 100 most populous countries, WhatsApp leads in 65 of them; in markets like Nigeria, South Africa, and Brazil, over 90% of internet users use WhatsApp monthly.

The creator economy that Meta is trying to optimize is global. The cross-border remittance market is worth approximately $800 billion annually, currently relying on correspondent bank systems that take days and incur high fees. In this context, stablecoins that settle faster and cost less represent a significant improvement.

In other words, these are two different theories. X aims to be a bank for existing users, while Meta seeks to be the payment infrastructure for the global internet covered by its platform. They are not actually competing for the same objective. Meta disclosed fourth-quarter 2025 revenue of $59.89 billion, a 24% year-on-year increase. The company has enough capital to pursue this goal seriously.

For Meta, data privacy issues remain. In January 2026, Instagram faced a data scraping incident that resulted in the exposure of data from 17.5 million users. Meta's standard response to such incidents is that the system was not compromised, only publicly accessible data was collected. However, when the data involved begins to include transaction records, this response becomes less significant. Overlaying financial data on social graph data creates a more complete and easily exploited identity profile than using either type of data alone. Meta must provide compelling evidence in this regard to ensure large-scale integration, avoiding political backlash as happened in 2019.

Moreover, there is a more immediate business reality. A platform that can see what you bought (rather than just what you clicked) has directional data that is much more precise than a platform that cannot do this. Meta's advertising business relies on behavioral inference, while transaction data eliminate that inference.

The regulatory environment is friendlier than ever, but not unconditionally friendly. The GENIUS Act prohibits stablecoins from paying interest, so Meta's products are positioned as payment rather than savings. This ban also sets a ceiling on the appeal of Meta products in developed markets, as users already have other income-generating products to choose from. The use cases in emerging markets are more sustainable but also more complex due to the need to operate across dozens of different regulatory jurisdictions.

However, none of this changes our core observation about what is happening.

In 2019, the debate centered on whether Facebook should be allowed to handle funds on a large scale. Today, that debate has been settled, and Meta ultimately won, as the regulatory environment has deemed that stablecoins issued by regulated third parties and distributed by large platforms pose manageable risks. The GENIUS Act essentially gives companies like Meta a license to do what Libra was trying to do through different frameworks.

Last year, the circulating supply of stablecoins exceeded $300 billion. It is expected to reach $33 trillion in transaction volume by 2025. Stripe's stablecoin transaction volume has reached $400 billion and has maintained growth even during market downturns. The only unresolved issue is distribution, and Meta has 3.98 billion monthly active users.

The "adoption" battle in the cryptocurrency space has revolved around how to get people to choose to use it. The system Meta is building does not require users to make that choice. That choice already exists at the infrastructure level, and what users experience is as convenient as transferring money on WhatsApp.

Meta is not the only company doing this, but it is the largest, and it is doing so in a market where stablecoin payments are superior to traditional bank payments.

As for whether this is beneficial for what people typically understand as "cryptocurrency"—namely, decentralization, token prices, and the broader DeFi ecosystem—that is another question. But it is certain that it favors the volume of stablecoin transactions and the practicality of dollar-denominated digital payments as a global infrastructure. Libra originally aimed to create a new form of currency, while the 2026 version is content with transferring existing funds more efficiently and economically than current payment systems.

This is a smaller goal, easier to achieve, and it has nearly 4 billion potential users.

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