Samsung Wallet Will Add Stablecoin Support, Including USDC

Samsung wants stablecoins living next to your boarding pass. At Galaxy Unpacked in London on July 22, the company said Samsung Wallet—the app that already stores payment cards, IDs, and hotel keys—will add native support for stablecoins. Samsung didn’t name a launch date, an issuer, or which blockchain the tokens would run on.

“Samsung Wallet will expand beyond cash and savings. It will embrace New forms of digital value, including stablecoins,” said Lee Dinham, Samsung’s product manager, on stage, adding that the move would make the company one of the first major smartphone brands to offer native stablecoins.

“This will make Samsung one of the first major mobile brands to bring native stablecoins to a Smartphone, enabling fast and trusted digital value transfers,” Dinham said.

Stablecoins are tokens designed to hold a steady value, usually $1, by being backed one-to-one with cash or short-term government debt. Samsung showed a wallet mockup holding Circle’s USDC, the second-largest stablecoin by market value, without confirming Circle as a partner in the endeavor.

Samsung hasn’t said whether the feature will be custodial, meaning Samsung or some other third party holds users’ funds, or non-custodial, where users alone control the private keys that unlock their own money.

Samsung’s long crypto résumé

None of this is new territory for Samsung. The company built crypto storage into Galaxy phones back in 2019 through Knox, a hardware-isolated vault unlocked only by PIN or fingerprint, and later added support for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron, and Stellar. In 2021, Samsung let Galaxy owners link hardware wallets like the Ledger Nano S directly to that vault.

Last October, Samsung expanded a deal with Coinbase that put crypto purchases directly inside Samsung Wallet for 75 million U.S. Galaxy owners. “Samsung Wallet is a trusted tool to millions of Galaxy users,” Drew Blackard, the company’s senior vice president of mobile product management, said of that deal.

The stablecoin plan landed alongside the Galaxy Card, Samsung’s first credit card in the United States, issued by Barclays on the Visa network with 5% cash back on Samsung purchases and 3% on Samsung Wallet transactions. Visa’s Kirk Stuart said the card reflects how “consumers expect payments to be embedded into the digital experiences they use every day.” Samsung framed the wider effort as a “secured payments and rewards experience.”