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.
“[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.
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.
A Worldpay spokesperson told Fortune that the company “does not comment on our clients.”
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.
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.
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.
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.’”
