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TL;DR: Coinbase is powering USDC inside Samsung Wallet, with the stablecoin feature due to reach 82 million compatible Galaxy devices in the United States from the final week of October. Coinbase Prime will custody the USDC, while Samsung says eligible users will be able to send funds to crypto wallets and qualifying bank accounts in more than 60 countries.
Coinbase is about to put USDC somewhere most crypto companies can only dream of reaching: directly inside the wallet that already ships on tens of millions of smartphones.
The exchange announced Thursday that it will power the stablecoin experience inside Samsung Wallet, extending an existing relationship between the two companies into actual dollar-denominated crypto balances.
Samsung had already revealed that stablecoin functionality would begin rolling out to eligible US Galaxy users in the final week of October. Coinbase has now filled in a major part of the infrastructure behind that launch.
USDC will appear as the default dollar stablecoin when an eligible Samsung Wallet user chooses to add a stablecoin balance. The assets will be held through Coinbase Prime Vault, with Bastion providing regulated stablecoin custody and payments infrastructure around the service.
The scale is what makes the launch unusual.
Samsung says the feature will be available across 82 million Galaxy devices in the United States that are compatible with Samsung Wallet. That figure represents compatible devices rather than guaranteed active users, but it still gives USDC an enormous potential distribution channel without requiring people to download a dedicated crypto application.
Samsung is also designing the feature around payments rather than trading.
Eligible users will be able to send USDC to compatible crypto wallets internationally, and Samsung says transfers to qualifying bank accounts will be supported in more than 60 countries. In those cases, recipients may receive local currency rather than stablecoins.
That matters because the most important stablecoin growth increasingly has little to do with speculative crypto activity.
USDC and competing dollar tokens are being pushed into remittances, business payments, settlement and treasury operations. Putting one of them inside a mainstream mobile wallet removes several of the steps that have historically made stablecoins feel like specialist financial products.
A user will not need to install a separate wallet extension or manually manage a private key. Samsung says biometric authentication on the registered Galaxy device will be required for transfers.
The companies are also working with other infrastructure providers. Samsung identified Solana and Sui among the technical partners supporting blockchain connectivity for the service.
For Coinbase, the arrangement gives Prime another consumer-facing role despite the product itself being built primarily for institutional custody and infrastructure.
For Samsung, it is a test of whether stablecoins can become another ordinary wallet feature beside payment cards, IDs and digital keys.
The first version remains deliberately narrow. It is US-only, requires eligibility and identity verification, and begins with USDC rather than a menu of tokens.
But Samsung is already discussing possible future capabilities, including online and in-store stablecoin payments and expansion into additional markets.
Crypto companies have spent years trying to persuade consumers to enter crypto applications. This launch reverses that equation.
USDC is going to an application consumers already have.
