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2026-02-25 16:05:00
Social media giant Meta is quietly plotting a return to stablecoins. This time, however, the primary beneficiary may not be Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse, but the US Treasury market.
On Feb. 24, Coindesk reported that Meta was exploring stablecoin-based payments for a possible rollout in the second half of 2026, likely through a third-party provider rather than a Meta-issued token.
The structure marks a break from the Libra era and suggests Meta is pursuing the utility of digital dollars, cheap and instant settlement, without reviving the full political backlash that followed its earlier attempt to build a private global currency.
If the effort moves forward, the significance may extend beyond crypto adoption.
Stablecoins already have a market capitalization of roughly $309 billion, and under a regulated reserve model, more growth in that market can translate into more demand for short-dated US government debt.
That is the hinge in Meta’s latest stablecoin push. Washington may still resist the platform risk, while Treasury markets gain a new source of structural demand for bills.
A second attempt in a different policy environment
Meta’s first push into this space, through Libra in 2019, faced immediate resistance because it appeared to be a private currency with instant global scale.
At the time, the concern was not only financial stability. It was also power. A platform with billions of users, deep network effects, and control over distribution appeared ready to insert itself into the monetary system.
Those concerns did not disappear. They changed shape.
Stablecoins are now less a theoretical product and more an established settlement layer. They already move capital across exchanges, payment corridors, and savings channels in emerging markets.
The policy backdrop for these digital assets has also significantly shifted.
In 2025, the US established a legal framework for payment stablecoins through the GENIUS Act, with the White House presenting it as a route to regulated growth and the Treasury describing stablecoins as a potential multi-trillion-dollar industry.
That is the key difference between then and now. The debate is no longer centered on whether stablecoins should exist. It is increasingly about who can distribute them, how reserves are managed, and what guardrails apply.
Meta’s reported approach fits that new landscape. By integrating a third-party stablecoin provider instead of issuing its own token, the company can frame the product as a payments feature rather than a sovereign-style monetary experiment.
This also keeps reserve management, and the scrutiny that comes with it, off Meta’s own balance sheet.
How stablecoin growth becomes Treasury bill demand
The Treasury angle in this story is not rhetorical. It comes directly from how stablecoin reserves are built.
If payment stablecoins are expected to be backed by high-quality liquid assets, issuers tend to hold short-dated US government debt.
That reserve design links stablecoin adoption to Treasury bill demand in a straightforward way.
Essentially, more stablecoins in circulation mean more reserves, and more reserves mean more bill buying if issuers stay concentrated in short-term government paper.
The market is already moving in that direction. Tether, the largest stablecoin issuer, says its Treasury exposure exceeded $141 billion at year-end 2025.
At that scale, stablecoin reserve management is no longer a niche crypto topic. It is part of the short-term dollar system.
This is why the growth forecasts matter so much. Standard Chartered projects stablecoins could reach $2 trillion in market cap by end-2028.
In that scenario, the bank estimates stablecoins could generate roughly $0.8 trillion to $1.0 trillion of incremental demand for Treasury bills.
Set that against the size of the market, and the number becomes harder to dismiss.
US Treasury advisory materials show bills outstanding at around $6.55 trillion at the end of 2025. An incremental $0.8 trillion to $1.0 trillion bid is large enough to matter for supply dynamics, bill scarcity, and front-end funding conditions.
It does not mean stablecoins would dominate the Treasury market. However, it does mean they could become a visible source of demand in the part of the curve used as a cash-equivalent reserve base.
That creates the central irony in Meta’s return. A company that once triggered a policy backlash over digital money could, this time, help deepen demand for the US government’s shortest debt.
Meta’s role is distribution, and distribution changes curves
Meta does not need to issue a stablecoin to shape the market. Its advantage is distribution.
The company reported 3.58 billion “Family daily active people” as of December 2025. Even a low single-digit adoption rate across that base can create meaningful payment volume.
In payments, behavior matters more than branding. If users see a cheap, fast transfer option and use it repeatedly, the underlying rail can scale quickly.
The use cases are already clear. Creators want faster payouts. Small businesses want lower-cost settlement. Families sending money across borders want to avoid paying 5% to 10% in fees and foreign-exchange spreads.
Stablecoins fit all three, especially when embedded as infrastructure rather than presented as a standalone crypto product.
That is where Meta can act as a multiplier. It can take a tool that is already common in crypto markets and make it feel ordinary in consumer finance.
Treasury markets do not need consumers to care about stablecoins as a concept. They only need stablecoin balances to grow, because reserve demand follows issuance.
Mike Ippolito, Blockworks co-founder, made that distribution point directly. He said:
“People aren’t appreciating how big the Meta stablecoin news is.”
He also tied the current moment to the last Meta cycle. “When Meta first unveiled Libra in 2019, it was a $1 billion market that went to $170 billion in just three years,” he said. “Today, the market for stables is $300 billion.”
Ippolito then pushed the thesis further, arguing:
“Absent ANY other growth, Meta driven payments would send it to $1 trillion easy.”
He added that stablecoin payments on Meta apps would provide the crypto sector with “3 billion (potential) new users.”
The numbers in that argument are not a bank’s forecast, and they do not settle the policy question.
They do, however, capture the part of the story markets tend to focus on first: distribution at scale can accelerate adoption faster than most macro models assume.
A scenario range for 2028 to 2030
A cleaner way to frame the outlook is to treat stablecoin growth as a range of outcomes, then map each one to Treasury bill demand.
In a bear case, policy friction remains high and product-market fit is weaker than many expect. JPMorgan has argued that trillion-dollar growth projections are too optimistic, with a much smaller market, around $500 billion by 2028, as a more realistic endpoint.
In that version, stablecoins still expand, but reserve demand for bills is incremental rather than transformative.
Meta may roll out payment features, but adoption remains concentrated in narrow use cases, such as creator payouts and selected remittance corridors, while broader consumer usage stays limited.
In a base case, regulated expansion continues, and platform distribution helps normalize stablecoin usage. Standard Chartered’s $2 trillion by end-2028 scenario becomes the center of gravity.
Stablecoins move deeper into mainstream fintech plumbing, especially for internet-native income and cross-border settlement.
Meta does not need to be the whole market. It only needs to reduce friction and make stablecoin payouts the default option in the products people already use.
In that setting, the estimated $0.8 trillion to $1.0 trillion of incremental Treasury bill demand becomes a plausible market outcome, not a tail-risk forecast.
In a bull case, the story broadens from fintech efficiency to global dollarization. Citi has published scenarios that place stablecoins near $2 trillion by 2030 in a base case and as high as $4 trillion in a bull case. The driver in that world is larger than crypto trading.
Stablecoins become a consumer-facing form of dollar access in countries with volatile currencies and expensive banking rails. Notably, several reports from emerging markets already point to strong stablecoin preference in high-inflation environments.
If that trend spreads, stablecoins become a channel for private dollarization, and Treasury bill demand rises as a reserve consequence.
The point of these scenario ranges are not precision. It is to show that once stablecoins pass a certain scale, reserve allocation becomes a Treasury market issue as much as a crypto market issue.
Why Washington may still push back
Even with a legal framework in place, Meta’s return to stablecoin payments is likely to trigger resistance in Washington, and the objections will be structural.
Concentration is one concern. Stablecoins remain dominated by a handful of issuers. If a major issuer faces a confidence shock, redemptions can force rapid liquidation of reserves or financing activity in short-term markets.
At a small scale, that is a contained event. At larger scale, it becomes a funding and liquidity question.
Run dynamics are another concern. Stablecoins buy bills in calm conditions, but they can become sellers, or heavy liquidity users against those holdings, when users redeem in size.
That kind of behavior does not need to overwhelm the Treasury market to matter. It only needs to become one more moving part in front-end funding conditions.
Meta’s role adds a separate layer of concern.
Even without issuing a token, a wallet or payments layer embedded in social apps raises familiar governance questions, including payment access, surveillance pressure, and the influence a platform can exert over financial behavior for billions of users.
Those risks explain why Meta’s stablecoin returns may still face political resistance, even as the reserve mechanics behind stablecoins make them increasingly useful to Treasury markets.
