Why Meta Started Its Stablecoin Payouts in Colombia and the Philippines
Meta launched stablecoin creator payouts in Colombia and the Philippines, two of the world's biggest remittance markets. Here is what the choice reveals.
Colombia and the Philippines received a combined $48.7 billion in remittances in 2025. Every dollar in that figure was already smaller when it arrived. The global average fee for sending money across borders sits at 6.49 percent, more than twice the target the UN set for 2030. Meta chose those two countries yesterday to begin its first stablecoin payouts to creators, citing high fees and slow bank transfers as the reason for the decision.
What Meta announced
Meta, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, confirmed on April 29 that eligible creators in Colombia and the Philippines can now receive earnings in USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin issued by Circle, directly to compatible crypto wallets on the Solana or Polygon blockchains. Stripe handles the backend infrastructure and tax documentation for participating creators. The pilot is currently limited in scope. Meta does not provide a conversion service from USDC to local currency, meaning creators who want to cash out must transfer funds to a third-party exchange and handle the process independently.
Polygon's chief executive said the programme could expand to more than 160 countries by the end of 2026. For Meta, the rollout is also a second attempt at something the company could not complete the first time. It launched a stablecoin project called Libra in 2019, rebranded it as Diem, and shut it down in 2022 after sustained regulatory opposition from lawmakers in the United States and Europe.
This time, Meta is using Circle's USDC rather than issuing its own stablecoin, a distinction that keeps the company outside the issuer role that attracted regulatory scrutiny the first time.
Why those two countries
The Philippines is the world's fourth-largest remittance-receiving economy. In 2025, overseas Filipino workers sent home a record $35.63 billion, representing 7.3 percent of the country's GDP, according to the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. The United States is the single largest source of those transfers, accounting for 40 percent of total inflows. Colombia received $13.1 billion in remittances in 2025, also a record, with inflows surpassing foreign direct investment for the first time in twenty years, according to the Banco de la República. More than half of Colombia's remittances came from the United States and Spain.
The supported wallets for the Meta pilot include GCash's GCrypto and Coins.ph. GCash is the dominant mobile payments app in the Philippines, with over 90 million registered users. Coins.ph operates as one of the country's largest entry points into digital payments, used primarily for practical transfers. The wallet list is as deliberate as the country list.
The cost of the old system
The global average cost of sending $200 in remittances stood at 6.49 percent in 2025, according to World Bank data compiled by Stripe. In sub-Saharan Africa, the average rises to 8.78 percent. In 2023, banks charged an average of around 12 percent, making them the most expensive channel, according to World Bank records. The UN Sustainable Development Goal 10.c targets a global average below 3 percent by 2030, a target the current global average is still more than double.
These percentages translate directly into household income. Colombia received $13.1 billion in remittances in 2025. At the 2025 global average fee rate, roughly $850 million was extracted from those inflows before the money reached Colombian families. The fee operates as a levy on economic migration, paid by the people with the least room to absorb it.
The week that confirmed a direction
Meta's announcement did not arrive in isolation. On the same day, Visa reported that its stablecoin settlement pilot had reached a $7 billion annualized run rate, up 50 percent from the previous quarter, now spanning nine blockchains including Solana, Polygon, and Stellar. Two days earlier, Western Union's chief executive confirmed on an earnings call that the company's dollar-backed stablecoin, USDPT, would launch next month on Solana as a direct replacement for the SWIFT interbank network the company uses to settle with its 500,000 global agents.
Western Union is 175 years old. The company choosing to launch a stablecoin to replace its own settlement backbone tells you something about what happens when the cost of the existing system becomes harder to justify than the cost of replacing it.
The fintech industry has spent a decade promising cheaper cross-border payments. What changed this week is the number of institutions moving in the same direction at the same time. Several of the largest names in global payments, among them a 175-year-old money transfer company, a major card network, and the platform with more active users than any other on earth, all announced significant stablecoin moves within 48 hours. The creators in Cebu and Bogota connecting their wallets to a Facebook payout screen are the first to receive income through infrastructure built to stop charging people for crossing a border.
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