Four years ago, Meta tried to launch its own stablecoin and got absolutely buried by regulators. Now they're quietly trying again, and the climate couldn't be more different.
The company recently started paying select creators in Colombia and the Philippines using USDC, a dollar-backed stablecoin running on Solana and Polygon. No fanfare, no press conference. Just a quiet update to their website. Creators who opt in type their crypto wallet address into Facebook's payout platform, and that's it. Meta doesn't convert anything to local currency, so you need to know what you're doing.
The contrast with the last attempt is kind of wild. Back in 2019, Meta announced Libra with a lot of noise, an open-source stablecoin backed by payments giants and VC firms, pitched as a financial inclusion play for Meta's billions of users. Congress immediately treated it like a threat to the global financial order. By 2022, the project (renamed Diem by then) was dead, and Meta pivoted hard into the metaverse.
What changed? Mostly Washington. The GENIUS Act was passed in 2025, creating the first real regulatory framework for dollar-backed stablecoins in the US. That gave companies the clarity they needed to actually move. And move they did. Shopify now lets merchants accept USDC, Western Union is launching on Solana, and DoorDash is exploring paying drivers in stablecoins. Meta isn't being bold here; they're following a wave that's already cresting.
Polygon Labs CEO Marc Boiron says Meta's program is expected to expand to 160+ countries by the end of the year. Whether that timeline holds is another question, but the direction is clear.
The practical limitations of the current rollout are real: no currency conversion, Stripe handling the tax reporting side, and availability limited to two countries for now. But this isn't meant to be the finished product. It's a test, and a very careful one.
The stablecoin market has grown more than a hundredfold since Meta first floated Libra. The infrastructure is there. The regulation is (finally) there. The only thing left is execution, and that's the part Meta has historically been good at when it's not being blocked at the door.
