Most Americans still don't know what a stablecoin is. Offer them the safety net of a bank account, though, and a majority say they'd use one.
That's the principal finding from Visa's Money Travels 2026 report, released Wednesday. In a hypothetical scenario where stablecoins came with bank-level fraud protection and deposit insurance, the share of Americans willing to use them for international transfers jumped from 36% to 56%, the payments giant said.
Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies pegged to a stable asset, usually the U.S. dollar, and designed to avoid Bitcoin-style price swings. They don't carry FDIC insurance, and Visa stressed that its scenario doesn't suggest such protections exist or are coming.
Familiarity is the bigger hurdle. Some 56% of U.S. respondents had never heard of stablecoins, and many who had wrongly assumed they fluctuate like Bitcoin.
The provider matters, too. Interest rose to 45% when stablecoins were offered through an existing financial provider. About six in 10 Americans said they'd trust a traditional bank (61%) or a global payment network (60%) with digital currency services. Visa, of course, is one of the latter.
The trend held outside the United States as well. In Latin America, willingness more than doubled from 34% to 74% with protections in place. Morning Consult ran the survey from Feb. 24 to March 2, polling 45,445 people across 20 markets, including 2,192 U.S. adults.
Sep 16 Sep 18 Sep 20 Sep 22 Sep 23 $87.2k $83.3k $79.5k $75.7k 24h High High $87,251 24h Low Low $83,654 Vol Vol $2.0B Market projections Odds by Myriad This week Above $84,000 Above $84k 54 % chance This month Above $84,000 Above $84k 54 % chance → Buy Bitcoin with USDT Powered by Jupiter $ 50 $ 100 $ 500 Buy Price data by CoinGecko CoinGecko More Bitcoin news and projections → Visa says scams loom large as well. Some 36% of U.S. remitters said they'd encountered a cross-border payment scam, and 44% worry about AI deepfakes impersonating family members.
"Our research shows what matters most to those who rely on that lifeline: trust," said Vira Platonova, global head of Visa Direct.
Visa has been laying stablecoin rails for years. Its stablecoin settlement volume hit an annualized rate above $20 billion. That's up from a $3.5 billion run rate when it began U.S. settlement in USDC on Solana last December. In August, Visa Direct added stablecoin payouts through Zerohash .
Wall Street is watching. BlackRock put stablecoins' market cap above $300 billion this month, with more than $11 trillion in adjusted transaction volume last year. The asset manager believes AI agents will drive the next wave of adoption for stablecoins as crypto at large.