Samsung Wallet will add support for stablecoins, including USDC

Samsung wants stablecoins to live next to your boarding pass. At Galaxy Unpacked in London on July 22, the company said that Samsung Wallet — the app that already stores payment cards, IDs, and hotel keys — will add native support for stablecoins. Samsung has not specified the launch date, issuer, or type of blockchain the tokens will run on.

“Samsung Wallet will expand beyond cash and savings. It will embrace new forms of digital value, including stablecoins,” Lee Denham, Samsung’s chief product officer, said on stage, adding that the move will 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 reliable digital value transfers,” Denham said.

Stablecoins are tokens designed to hold a fixed value, usually one dollar, by being backed by cash or short-term government debt. Samsung showed off a mockup of a wallet containing Circle’s US dollarsthe second largest stablecoin by market cap, without confirming that Circle is a partner in this endeavor.

Samsung did not say whether the feature would be custodial, meaning that Samsung or another third party holds users’ funds, or non-custodial, where users alone control the private keys that unlock their private funds.

Samsung’s Long Cryptocurrency Biography

None of this represents new territory for Samsung. The company built cryptocurrency storage into Galaxy phones back in 2019 with Knox, a hardware-isolated vault that is only opened by PIN or fingerprint, and later added support for Bitcoin, Ethereum, Tron, and Stellar. In 2021, Samsung is allowing Galaxy phone owners to link Hardware wallets Like the Ledger Nano S straight into that vault.

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

The stablecoin plan arrived alongside the Galaxy Card, Samsung’s first credit card in the US, issued by Barclays on the Visa network with 5% cashback on Samsung purchases and 3% on Samsung Wallet transactions. Visa’s Kirk Stewart said the card reflects how “consumers expect payments to be integrated into the digital experiences they use every day.” Samsung has framed the broader effort as a “secure payments and rewards experience.”