Meta has begun routing creator earnings through Circle's USDC on Solana and Polygon via Stripe, starting in Colombia and the Philippines. It is the company's first stablecoin product since regulators forced it to abandon Libra in 2019.
Meta has begun paying select creators in USDC, routed through Stripe and settled on Solana or Polygon. The pilot launched on Wednesday in Colombia and the Philippines — two markets where dollar-earning creators currently lose meaningful percentages of every payout to bank conversion and remittance fees. Eligible users link a third-party crypto wallet, receive their earnings as Circle's regulated dollar stablecoin, and get tax documents generated jointly by Meta and Stripe.
It is the company's first stablecoin product since 2019, when a Senate Banking Committee hearing and a coalition of central banks killed Libra before it could launch. Meta rebranded the project as Diem, kept trying for two more years, then sold the technology to Silvergate in early 2022 and walked away from crypto payments entirely. The Diem Association dissolved. Mark Zuckerberg's pivot to 'the future of finance' ended with David Marcus leaving for a Bitcoin Lightning startup.
What is different this time is that Meta is not issuing the dollars. Circle does — and Circle is publicly listed, GENIUS Act-compliant, and licensed under MiCA in Europe. Meta is plugging into existing payment rails through Stripe, which acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion last year and has been quietly building the orchestration layer that lets Fortune 500 companies route dollars on-chain without ever touching a wallet themselves. Meta is now the largest of those companies.
The choice of countries is not accidental. Colombia and the Philippines together host millions of creators who earn in US dollars on Meta's platforms (Reels, Facebook, Instagram) and convert those dollars through banks or remittance services that take three to seven per cent on the way down. USDC payouts on Solana cost a fraction of a cent. Polygon is comparable. Settlement is near-instant, and for a creator earning a few thousand dollars a month, the difference between a five-per-cent fee and a one-cent fee is not theoretical; it is a meaningful share of their income.
One detail buried in the rollout is that Meta will not convert USDC into local currency itself. Creators receive raw stablecoin and have to find their own off-ramp. That is a deliberate choice. It keeps Meta out of the money-transmitter regulatory perimeter in every country it enters, and it pushes the conversion margin to local crypto exchanges and OTC desks who are usually cheaper than the banks creators were using anyway.
Meta has said it plans to expand the program globally throughout 2026, which is corporate language for: if it works in two countries, we will add a third. Whether it works depends on adoption among creators who, in many markets, have never held crypto and may not want to. But the friction is lower than it has been in any prior attempt. Stripe handles the off-ramp infrastructure, tax docs are generated automatically, and the wallet linking flow looks identical to the linking flow for a bank account.
The competitive picture matters. TikTok pays creators through PayPal and bank transfers. YouTube uses AdSense, which routes through Western Union and bank wires. Western Union announced its own dollar stablecoin earlier this month, set to plug into 360,000 payout locations in May. The race to remove banks from the international payouts loop is now a real race, and Meta — with three billion users and a creator economy worth tens of billions — has just joined it on the side that bypasses banks entirely.
There is a smaller story underneath. Stripe is the connective tissue here. Its Tempo chain, launched earlier this month with privacy zones for institutional payments, is part of a larger play to become the on-chain settlement provider for the world's biggest non-crypto companies. Meta is the highest-profile customer Stripe has landed publicly. The same logic explains why KuCoin recently put USDC on Mastercard's rails in Australia. Corporate appetite for stablecoin distribution is no longer hypothetical, and the legacy networks are scrambling to put their logos on the front end.
For Circle, this is the kind of customer that bends the entire stablecoin curve. USDC supply has grown 73 per cent year-over-year against USDT's 36 per cent, and Meta is the type of distribution that compounds. Every creator paid in USDC is a wallet Circle can later route into yield, savings, or merchant payments. The actual volumes from a small Colombian-Philippine pilot will be modest. The strategic value of having Meta as a public reference customer is not.
What has not been said publicly is what happens when a creator in a country with capital controls (say, Argentina, Nigeria, or Turkey) wants the same product. Meta has not commented on that. Neither has Stripe. But the architecture works the same way regardless of jurisdiction, and the global rollout starts now.
