Samsung Just Vowed Stablecoins for Hundreds of Millions of Wallets. Eventually.

Samsung took the opportunity of its Galaxy Unpacked show in London on Wednesday to announce support for stablecoins natively in Samsung Wallet. No launch date. No named issuer. There is no list of eligible markets or supported assets. Just the promise, supplemented with three foldables, two watches and one credit card that works.

The story here is that gap there between announcement and product.

What was delivered by Samsung turns out to be a Visa card

A new Samsung Galaxy Card, issued by Barclays, is now live, taking you 5% back on direct Samsung purchases in the US with Visa. Your payment cards, digital IDs, boarding passes and house and car keys all already sit inside Samsung Wallet. Samsung has dubbed Wallet the financial center of the Galaxy ecosystem, and this card is what you can physically stick in your wallet today as part of that pitch.

Stablecoins are the one part you can't. Samsung, as the announcement described it, is growing Wallet from pure payments and savings into digital value transfer. Well, that's a mouthful there.

The one thing no one else has is distribution

Despite this, still take the promise seriously, and it is because of the numbers below. Meanwhile, Samsung ships to hundreds of millions of Galaxy users and Wallet is preinstalled. So far all of the stablecoin adoption stories have been some form of downloading a separate app, funding an exchange account, managing a wallet. Samsung would eliminate all three steps simultaneously.

That's the part which has been lacking for a while in payments industry. In a recent survey by Fireblocks, 295 senior executives at banks and payment firms were interviewed to find that 48% called real-time settlement as the one-single most important advantage of stablecoins, meanwhile now describing regulation as a greenlight rather than an obstacle (85%, up from just 25% in 2023 who said regulation wasn't standing in their way). The institutions are ready. The bottleneck has been consumer access.

The timing of the GENIUS Act is no coincidence

This action comes as the US is finalising its stablecoin rulebook. Since July 18, the deadline for carrying out the GENIUS Act, agencies are still finalizing rules, and just over a week ago, US and UK Treasuries issued a joint statement on stablecoin convergence. A hardware company vowing native stablecoin support right now is interpreting the same regulatory tea leaves as anyone and everyone else.

It also places pressure where Samsung desires it to be. Apple has been mum on crypto payments within Apple Pay. If Galaxy devices ship with functioning stablecoin support and Apple doesn't respond, that's a real feature gap in an environment where the two companies have to counter each other's moves instantly.

What would make this real

Watch for three things. An issuer name, because the choice of USDC, USDG or other bank-issued asset tells you what regulatory bet Samsung is making. A market list, because MiCA in Europe and the GENIUS framework in the US impose different requirements and Samsung sells everywhere. And a date, because keynote features without dates have a way of fading between announcements.

For now, Samsung has achieved something substantive but only half-done. This put stablecoins on an equal footing with its star phones, in front of a mass consumer audience that no manufacturer this size has reached before. The distribution channel it just outlined would be the biggest one in crypto. It just doesn't exist yet.

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