Samsung will let American Galaxy owners send dollar stablecoins abroad from its phone wallet

Samsung said on 7 October that its phone wallet app will let people in the United States send money abroad in USDC, starting in the last week of October. USDC is a stablecoin: a digital token, issued by the American company Circle, that is meant to be worth one dollar. Samsung says the feature will reach 82 million Galaxy phones in America. That is the number of phones able to run it, not the number of people who will use it.

Users will be able to send USDC to a crypto wallet or exchange account elsewhere. Samsung charges nothing for that, though the service receiving it may. They will also be able to send money to bank accounts in more than 60 countries, where it arrives in local currency and the person receiving it needs no crypto wallet. Those bank transfers do carry fees, which vary by country and amount and are shown before the sender confirms. CoinDesk's headline called the service zero-fee; Samsung's small print says that holds only for transfers to crypto wallets.

Samsung says plainly that it is not a bank, a money transmitter or a crypto custodian, and that it will not hold customers' money. The accounts run on Bastion, an American firm with a New York trust company charter that holds and moves stablecoins for businesses. Bastion in turn keeps the USDC with Coinbase, the American crypto exchange, in its vault service for institutions. Two blockchains, Solana and Sui, carry the transfers. Samsung says it is launching now that the United States has a set of rules for stablecoins.

The partners tell the story differently. The Solana Foundation, which promotes the Solana blockchain, announced it as a Samsung partnership with Solana and did not mention Sui, Bastion or Coinbase. SamMobile, a site that covers Samsung, reported that the wallet now supports stablecoins. Samsung says the service starts in the last week of October.

Woncheol Chai, who heads Samsung's digital wallet team, said users can start "without installing another app or managing private keys themselves". A private key is the secret code that controls a crypto wallet; lose it and the money is usually gone. At first the service is open only to US residents aged 18 or over with a verified Samsung account, on a phone running Android 13 or later. Samsung says paying in shops with stablecoins, and launches in other countries, may follow as each country's rules allow.