A New Visa Survey Says 56% of Americans Are Open to the Idea of Using Stablecoins. Here's What Crypto Investors Need to Know.

Here's a question for the water cooler: Have you ever used a stablecoin? Most people would say no. Some of them would be wrong, or at least not entirely right.

Stablecoins are digital tokens pegged to a steady value. That's the U.S. dollar in about 98% of all stablecoins, though other solutions exist. They're the crypto world's least exciting asset, and that's on purpose. A dollar stablecoin is supposed to be worth a dollar today, tomorrow, and next Tuesday. That boring reliability, paired with the near-instant and low-cost transactions of a blockchain system, is exactly why payment companies like them.

The 56% figure comes with an asterisk

Visa's (NYSE: V) Money Travels 2026 survey says that most Americans are open to using stablecoins, with an important caveat. In the baseline scenario, 36% of U.S. respondents simply said they would use stablecoins. Interest climbed to 56% only when the survey described a hypothetical version with bank-level fraud protection and deposit insurance.

Those protections don't exist yet, and the survey's fine print says so. It's a bit like asking people whether they'd go camping in the Yukon, then getting a much warmer response once you mention future plans for a heated cabin with Wi-Fi.

Meanwhile, 56% of respondents had never heard of stablecoins. Some who had heard of them assumed their prices bounce around like Bitcoin. They don't, or at least they're not supposed to.

And there's an important overlap here: More than half of Visa's survey respondents thought stablecoins sound useful, given proper guardrails. Also, the term was completely new to more than half of them. Moving stablecoins into everyday usage is at least partly a marketing and financial education problem, then.

Your card may already speak stablecoin (quietly)

Here's the twist. The opinions unveiled in Visa's survey may not matter much, because stablecoins are slipping into the payment system through the back door.

Visa settles some card payments in stablecoins. The company says its stablecoin settlement hit a $20 billion annualized run rate in September, up more than 15-fold in a year.

Settlement is the unglamorous back-office step where banks square up with the card network. Some of them already do that in digital dollars rather than via traditional bank transfers. Visa also supports more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs, and payment volume across them nearly tripled over the past year.

The stablecoin back-end doesn't change the user experience at all. Visa just uses a different transport system, perhaps saving money or speeding up the process. And Visa's involvement doesn't make USDC (CRYPTO: USDC) or Tether (CRYPTO: USDT) no-brainer investments, since their prices are stable by definition.

Skip the coins, follow the pipes

The investable takeaway is still simple. You should look for the best providers of financial picks and shovels. Visa is starting to show its cards, alongside credit card peers Mastercard (NYSE: MA) and American Express (NYSE: AXP). Stablecoin backers like USDC issuer Circle Internet Group (NYSE: CRCL) are also interesting, since they earn more interest payouts when their stablecoins are widely used.

So stablecoins are coming to a wallet near you, whether you like it or not. Most of the time, you won't even see them. They'll just quietly move money around the planet a bit faster and cheaper, and the companies running the pipes will collect the fees.

American Express is an advertising partner of Motley Fool Money. Anders Bylund has positions in American Express and Bitcoin. The Motley Fool has positions in and recommends American Express, Bitcoin, Mastercard, and Visa. The Motley Fool has a disclosure policy.