Samsung confirmed at a Galaxy conference in London that Samsung Wallet will add native support for stablecoins. The company has not named an issuer, a blockchain, a market or a date, or said who will hold users' money.
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies built to hold a steady value, usually pegged one-to-one to the US dollar and backed by cash or short-term government debt. At the conference in London, Samsung showed a mockup of the wallet holding Circle's USDC alongside payment cards and boarding passes — the feature has been demonstrated, not merely described.
When one of the world's largest phone makers signals that stablecoins will sit in the wallet that ships with the device, adoption of crypto moves from dedicated apps and exchanges into software people already carry. The announcement from London is still a direction, not a product.
Samsung confirmed on 22 July, at its Galaxy Unpacked launch event in London, that Samsung Wallet will gain native support for stablecoins. Wallet is the app that already holds payment cards, IDs, hotel keys and travel documents.
Product manager Lee Dinham told the audience that Samsung Wallet would hold more than cash and savings, taking in new forms of digital value including stablecoins. Decrypt reports that Dinham described the move as making Samsung "one of the first major mobile brands to bring native stablecoins to a smartphone," enabling digital value to move quickly and securely.
Beyond those remarks and a single line in Samsung's own recap of the event, the company offered no product specification. Nor did it launch a new, standalone crypto wallet.
The mockup featured Circle's USDC, the second-largest stablecoin by market value. Neither Samsung nor Circle has confirmed a partnership, so the image is not confirmation that USDC will actually be available at launch.
It remains the only concrete indication of an issuer. The choice matters: the issuer determines who stands behind the reserves and the redemption terms, and a token that becomes the default inside Samsung Wallet gains visibility its rivals will not get. If the feature instead sits several steps away, behind a partner account, most of the benefit accrues to the partner.
Samsung has not said whether the arrangement will be custodial, with the company or a partner controlling users' funds, or non-custodial, with users alone controlling the private keys that unlock their money.
The distinction is not decoration. It determines what a user can do to regain access if something goes wrong, which compliance obligations are triggered, and who carries the risk. If it amounts only to a funding route into an account held elsewhere, Samsung Wallet plays no part in holding the tokens at all.
The stablecoin plans were presented at the conference together with the Galaxy Card, Samsung's first credit card in the US, issued by Barclays on the Visa network. The card returns five percent on Samsung purchases and three percent on transactions made through Samsung Wallet. Samsung describes the combination as a single experience covering payments and rewards.
According to Decrypt, Visa's Kirk Stuart said consumers now expect payments to be built into the digital experiences they use daily.
That the two were unveiled together says something about where Samsung places stablecoins: not as a crypto feature sitting beside the phone's other services, but as one payment instrument among several in the same app.
Samsung has built crypto storage into Galaxy phones since 2019, through its Knox security platform, a vault separated into dedicated hardware on the device and unlocked with a PIN or fingerprint. Support eventually covered bitcoin, ether, tron and stellar. In 2021, Galaxy owners could connect physical wallets such as the Ledger Nano S directly to the vault.
In October 2025, Coinbase and Samsung announced a partnership that would give Galaxy owners in the US exclusive access to the Coinbase One subscription inside the Samsung Wallet app. Coinbase described it as introducing more than 75 million Galaxy owners to the exchange, and the companies said they aimed to expand the effort globally in the months that followed. That link tied a familiar payment method to a separate crypto platform. Native stablecoins would move Samsung further into the transaction itself — provided users can actually hold and send the tokens in Wallet.
The figure of 800 million often attached to Samsung is the company's target for devices running Galaxy AI by the end of 2026. It is not a measure of Samsung Wallet users, of how many people will be eligible for the stablecoin feature, or of how many devices will receive it.
Distribution on that scale also assumes the feature is actually available. An app can push a new function to its entire user base at once. Samsung has named no market, no device tier and no order in which the feature will roll out — availability is not yet defined, let alone use. The ambition to go global was stated last autumn, but the US remains the only confirmed market.
How many people eventually receive it depends on which countries Samsung is permitted to offer it in. In the US, the framework comes from the GENIUS Act, passed in 2025 and now roughly a year old, while MiCA governs issuers and service providers across the EU/EEA. The Financial Stability Board, which coordinates financial regulation internationally, recommends that such arrangements meet applicable requirements before going live in a market. Global stablecoin supply currently sits near 310 billion dollars.
The result could be different products in different countries, or a deliberately narrow first launch. A token offered through a partner in one country will not necessarily follow the same model in another market.
Samsung owns the entry point to the user and the user experience. What determines the significance of this lies behind it: a full solution for holding, sending and spending stablecoins would open a new main road into crypto for very large groups of users. A simple handoff to another provider would be something far smaller — and so far, Samsung has not said which it will be.
Sources: Coinbase, Decrypt, CryptoSlate, SamMobile, TheStreet, Coin Interest Rate
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