The crypto industry has long sought a “killer app” to bring blockchains into the financial mainstream and, in stablecoins, it may have found one. Banks and fintechs are rapidly adopting stablecoins—digital tokens pegged to the value of the dollar—and now Big Tech firms are poised to do the same. According to sources familiar with the matter, Apple, X, Airbnb, and Google are all holding early conversations with crypto firms about integrating stablecoins.
The sources, who spoke with Fortune on the condition of anonymity to discuss private business conversations, said the firms view stablecoin adoption as a means to lower transaction costs and optimize cross-border payments.
Apple, X, Airbnb, and Google are not the only Big Tech names exploring stablecoins. Others include Meta, which is once again leaning into the payment technology after abandoning an ambitious earlier push that failed in the face of regulatory backlash. Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said the rideshare company is in the “study” phase of using stablecoins for global money transfers at a Bloomberg conference on Thursday.
The interest from Big Tech comes as stablecoins have attracted millions in venture funding and lawmaker attention as Congress weighs two bills that would regulate the asset class. And it follows a landmark acquisition from the payments giant Stripe of the stablecoin startup Bridge, which was a starting gun for many in Silicon Valley to take the technology seriously.
“[Stablecoins] are this old idea, but finally I think we’ve got the right pieces coming together such that it’s really coming into fruition,” said Haun Ventures partner Chris Ahn, who was an early investor in Bridge.
X and Apple did not respond to requests for comment.
“It’s pretty clear that this is probably one of the biggest upgrades to payments since the SWIFT network,” Rich Widmann, head of Web3 strategy at Google Cloud, told Fortune, who confirmed that the tech giant was exploring stablecoin integrations.
“While crypto payments aren’t something we’re focused on integrating into the platform in the near future, we’re always looking at all aspects of payments for ways to improve our community’s experience with it, including developments in digital assets and their use cases,” said an Airbnb spokesperson.
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Airbnb, X, and Apple
While Big Tech has long been at the forefront of payments innovation, Silicon Valley has been hesitant to move into crypto due to the regulatory crackdown under the Biden administration. That changed with the re-election of Donald Trump, whose administration has embraced blockchain and instructed agencies to loosen oversight of the crypto industry.
In the case of Airbnb, the short-term home rental platform has been in talks with crypto companies about potentially integrating stablecoins since the beginning of this year, according to four sources familiar with the matter.
Accepting stablecoins as a form of payment would allow Airbnb to cut back on the transaction fees it pays processors like Visa and Mastercard, according to one crypto company executive. The vacation rental company has been talking with one of its payment processors, Worldpay, about using stablecoins, according to another crypto company executive. Worldpay announced last week that it would enable stablecoin payouts with its partner, the stablecoin infrastructure company BNVK.
A Worldpay spokesperson told Fortune that the company “does not comment on our clients.”
Elon Musk’s social media platform X has also recently been in touch with crypto companies about integrating stablecoins into its fledgling payments app called X Money, according to three sources. Musk, a former executive at the fintech giant PayPal, has long expressed ambitions about creating an “everything app,” which would potentially include Venmo-like options for users to facilitate peer-to-peer payments. In January, X announced a partnership with Visa to create a digital wallet.
X is currently in talks with payments processor Stripe to potentially integrate stablecoin payments, according to one source familiar with the matter. A spokesperson for Stripe declined to comment.
Patrick Traughber, former head of consumer products and payments, led the discussions but left in January to work on the Sam Altman-backed crypto project World, according to two sources. Payam Abedi, a senior software engineer at X, is now leading the conversations, according to two sources. His public LinkedIn profile lists his title as “Money at X.” Abedi declined to comment, and Traughber did not respond to requests for comment.
Apple, which already has a massive presence in the payments ecosystem thanks to its Apple Pay system, has been in talks with crypto companies since January about integrating stablecoins into its payments infrastructure, according to four sources. One of these people told Fortune that these talks have included conversations with Matt Cavin, a senior director at stablecoin issuer Circle, whose public LinkedIn profile lists his job description at Circle as “strategic partnerships in stablecoin payments.” Circle did not respond to a request for comment.
Head in the cloud
While these three companies are in early conversations, Google Cloud is arguably the furthest along on stablecoin integrations. The tech giant has already accepted payments from two of its customers in PYUSD, PayPal’s stablecoin launched in partnership with the stablecoin infrastructure company Paxos. “We’ve invoiced the customer like we would normally invoice them. They’ve paid that bill the way they would normally pay it. But they’ve used stablecoins to effectuate settlement,” Widmann, the Google Cloud executive, told Fortune.
Although Widmann declined to say whether other divisions within Google were exploring stablecoins, he did say that the stablecoin payments went through Google’s central accounting office. “There isn’t a separate offshoot for stablecoin payments within Cloud,” he said.
One crypto executive involved in the Big Tech discussions told Fortune that one major roadblock for companies will be deciding which stablecoins to integrate. Tether, which issues the leading U.S.-dollar-backed stablecoin, has had longstanding concerns over its approach to compliance, and its main competitor, USDC, faces an uncertain future ownership as its parent company, Circle, just went through the initial public offeringprocess. Other options, such as PayPal’s PYUSD face low adoption. The executive said that some Big Tech companies might consider launching their own stablecoin, though Democratic lawmakers have sought to limit this option.
Though discussions for companies like Airbnb and X remain preliminary, Haun Ventures’ Ahn said that the shifting environment toward crypto is making stablecoins increasingly attractive to Big Tech. “Because they are bigger companies, they want to know that there is legitimacy here,” he told Fortune. “That credibility is being provided, not just from the regulatory aspects of it, but they actually see fintech leaders like Stripe leaning into this and they think, ‘I can trust this as well.’”
Analysts and supply chain experts are not sold on the Trump Organization touting its new smartphone as being “built in the United States,” saying it’s far more likely the $499 device will actually be produced in China.
The Trump Organization, the Trump family’s real estate, hospitality, and entertainment conglomerate, announced on Monday it would license its name to a wireless service called Trump Mobile and its gold-colored “T1” smartphone slated for an August release. The device will use a wireless provider dubbed Liberty Wireless and will operate on the Google Android operating system.
The Trump Organization’s announcement touted the phones as “proudly designed and built in the United States,” but analysts said it’s more likely the conglomerate is outsourcing manufacturing capabilities to an original device manufacturer (ODM) overseas, as least in the short term, as the U.S. does not have the manufacturing capabilities to build the phone.
“Despite being advertised as an American-made phone, it is likely that this device will be initially produced by a Chinese ODM,” Blake Przesmicki, an analyst at Counterpoint Research, said in a note published Monday.
Even if the U.S. did have smartphone production capabilities, he said, the company would have to rely on components imported from overseas.
The Trump Organization did not respond to Fortune’s request for comment.
Trump Organization executive vice president Eric Trump, for his part, admitted Trump Mobile would not initially be an entirely domestic endeavor.
“Eventually, all the phones can be built in the United States of America,” Trump said on The Benny Show podcast on Monday, suggesting the device is being produced or assembled overseas before its August launch.
Manufacturing limitations
President Donald Trump has tried to jumpstart domestic manufacturing by imposing sweeping tariffs, but experts have long warned of the U.S.’s production limitations. Apple, for example, set up its supply chain in China in the 1990s, and moving it would require extensive sourcing substitutions and increased labor costs that would drive the cost of a U.S.-made iPhone to more than $3,000, Wedbush Securities analyst Dan Ives previously said.
These barriers to expanding U.S. production are nearly universal in the industry, according to Przesmicki.
“Generally, no phones have been manufactured in the U.S. since the 2G era in over a decade,” Przesmicki told Fortune. “We have weaker supply chains, fewer capable employees in the smartphone sector, lower margins.”
Przesmicki suggested if any manufacturing of Trump-branded phones were to take place on American soil, it would be on a small scale, about 1,000 phones or fewer. Leo Gebbie, principal analyst at CCS Insight, told Fortune there’s “no serious chance” the Trump Organization has arranged for U.S. production of the T1 phones, especially before the August launch.
“The idea that this could be replicated in the U.S. in any sort of short- to medium-term timescale is fanciful,” Gebbie said. “It is an absolute pipe dream.”
Instead, according to Gebbie, the T1 phones will likely have their final assembly stage in the U.S., which would allow the company to avoid steep investments in domestic manufacturing by simply importing all components. This strategy, he said, could be closer to what the Trump Organization intended when it hailed phones “built” in the U.S.
Trump not immune to his own tariffs
The importing of phone components, the majority of which are made in China, would provide another supply chain hiccup for the Trump Organization by making it susceptible to tariffs Trump imposed for the express purpose of discouraging trade with China.
“This absolutely does raise the specter of the Trump Organization mobile falling foul of the tariffs that have been instigated by the Trump administration,” Gebbie said.
“Ultimately, whether we’re talking about screens, whether we’re talking about camera technologies, whether we’re talking about chipsets and processors and smartphones, almost all of this comes from the same manufacturing hubs in Asia,” he added.
The president last month threatened a 25% tariff on smartphones not produced in the U.S. and lambasted Apple for producing its iPhone in India—where it makes about 20% of its total output. Trump warned he would impose a 25% levy on Apple products if the company does not move manufacturing to the U.S.
Apple announced in February it would invest $500 billion in expanding U.S. plants over the next four years.
Gebbie suggested the Trump Organization’s emphasis on building its phone in the U.S—despite domestic manufacturing being unlikely—is to send a message to big companies that U.S. smartphone assembly is possible.
“Maybe it provides leverage for the Trump administration to go out to device-makers like Apple and Samsung and say, ‘Hey, we are marking smartphones in the U.S. Why aren’t you?’” Gebbie said.
A judge on Wednesday is being asked to clear the way for local governments and individual victims to vote on it.
Government entities, emergency room doctors, insurers, families of children born into withdrawal from the powerful prescription painkiller, individual victims and their families and others would have until Sept. 30 to vote on whether to accept the deal, which calls for members of the Sackler family who own the company to pay up to $7 billion over 15 years.
If approved, the settlement would be among the largest in a wave of lawsuits over the past decade as governments and others sought to hold drugmakers, wholesalers and pharmacies accountable for the opioid epidemic that started rising in the years after OxyContin hit the market in 1996. The other settlements together are worth about $50 billion, and most of the money is to be used to combat the crisis.
In the early 2000s, most opioid deaths were linked to prescription drugs, including OxyContin. Since then, heroin and then illicitly produced fentanyl became the biggest killers. In some years, the class of drugs was linked to more than 80,000 deaths, but that number dropped sharply last year.
The request of U.S. Bankruptcy Court Judge Sean Lane comes about a year after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a previous version of Purdue’s proposed settlement. The court found it was improper that the earlier iteration would have protected members of the Sackler family from lawsuits over opioids, even though they themselves were not filing for bankruptcy protection.
Under the reworked plan hammered out with lawyers for state and local governments and others, groups that don’t opt in to the settlement would still have the right to sue members of the wealthy family whose name once adorned museum galleries around the world and programs at several prestigious U.S. universities.
Under the plan, the Sackler family members would give up ownership of Purdue. They resigned from the company’s board and stopped receiving distributions from its funds before the company’s initial bankruptcy filing in 2019. The remaining entity would get a new name and its profits would be dedicated to battling the epidemic.
Most of the money would go to state and local governments to address the nation’s addiction and overdose crisis, but potentially more than $850 million would go directly to individual victims. That makes it different from the other major settlements.
The payouts would not begin until after a hearing scheduled for Nov. 10, during which Lane is to be asked to approve the entire plan if enough of the affected parties agree.
The report, produced by the nonpartisan CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation, factors in expected debt service costs and finds that the bill would increase interest rates and boost interest payments on the baseline projection of federal debt by $441 billion.
The analysis comes at a crucial moment as Trump is pushing the GOP-led Congress to act on what he calls his “big, beautiful bill.” It passed the House last month on a party-line vote, and now faces revisions in the Senate. Vice President JD Vance urged Senate Republicans during a private lunch meeting Tuesday to send the final package to the president’s desk.
“We’re excited to get this bill out,” said Senate Majority Leader John Thune afterward.
Tuesday’s report uses dynamic analysis by estimating the budgetary impact of the tax bill by considering how changes in the economy might affect revenues and spending. This is in contrast to static scoring, which presumes all other economic factors stay constant.
The CBO released its static scoring analysis earlier this month, estimating that Trump’s bill would unleash trillions in tax cuts and slash spending, but also increase deficits by $2.4 trillion over the decade and leave some 10.9 million more people without health insurance.
Republicans have repeatedly argued that a more dynamic scoring model would more accurately show how cutting taxes would spur economic growth — essentially overcoming any lost revenue to the federal government.
But the larger deficit numbers in the new analysis gave Democrats, who are unified against the big bill, fresh arguments for challenging the GOP position that the tax cuts would essentially pay for themselves.
“The Republican claim that this bill does not add to the debt or deficit is laughable, and the proof is in the numbers,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Budget Committee.
“The cost of these tax giveaways for billionaires, even when considering economic growth, will add even more to the debt than we previously expected,” he said.
Marc Goldwein, senior vice president and senior policy director for the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, said Tuesday on social media that considering the new dynamic analysis, “It’s not only not paying for all of itself, it’s not paying for any of itself.”
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent and other Republicans have sought to discredit the CBO, saying the organization isn’t giving enough credit to the economic growth the bill will create.
At the Capitol, Mehmet Oz, who heads up the Centers for Medicaid and Medicare Services and joined Vance at the GOP Senate lunch, challenged CBO’s findings when asked about its estimate that the bill would leave 10.9 million more people without health care, largely from new work requirements.
“What will an American do if they’re given the option of trying to get a job or an education or volunteering their community — having some engagement — or losing their Medicaid insurance coverage?” Oz asked. “I have more confidence in the American people than has been given to them by some of these analyzing organizations.”
Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee unveiled their proposal Monday for deeper Medicaid cuts, including new work requirements for parents of teens, as a way to offset the costs of making Trump’s tax breaks more permanent in their draft for the big bill.
The Senate’s version of the package also enhances Trump’s proposed new tax break for seniors, with a bigger $6,000 deduction for low- to moderate-income senior households earning no more than $75,000 a year for singles, $150,000 for couples.
The proposals from Senate Republicans keep in place the current $10,000 deduction of state and local taxes, called SALT, drawing quick blowback from GOP lawmakers from New York and other high-tax states, who fought for a $40,000 cap in the House-passed bill. Senators insisted negotiations continue.
Bessent said Tuesday that the Senate Republican proposal for the tax cuts bill “will deliver the permanence and certainty both individual taxpayers and businesses alike are looking for, driving growth and unleashing the American economy.”
“We look forward to continuing to work with the Senate and the House to further refine this bill and get it to President Trump’s desk,” he said in a news release.
While the House-passed bill exempted parents with dependents from the new Medicaid work requirements, the Senate’s version broadened the requirement to include parents of children older than 14, as part of their effort to combat waste in the program and push personal responsibility.
The work requirements “demonstrate that you are trying your hardest to help this country be greater,” Oz said. “By doing that, you earn the right to be on Medicaid.”
The CBO separately released another analysis on the tax bill last week, including a look at how the measure would affect households based on income distribution. It estimates the bill would cost the poorest Americans roughly $1,600 a year while increasing the income of the wealthiest households by an average of $12,000 annually.