Costs and pricing

How the money moves

A stablecoin issuer is a float business. It invests the dollars behind each coin in Treasury bills and money market funds, keeps the interest, and pays holders nothing. Circle's quarter to June 2026 shows the shape. Reserve income was 95% of revenue, and Circle paid 61% of it out to distributors. Coinbase alone got 49%, while only about 12% of USDC sat on Coinbase, because their 2023 agreement also gives Coinbase half of what's left from USDC held everywhere else.

The business moves with interest rates. Circle's filing says a one-point rise adds about $737 million a year of reserve income, about half of which flows on to distributors. Tether runs the same model with no partner taking half: its profit of about $1.5 billion in the quarter to June 2026, on $184.6 billion of USDT, works out to about 3.3% a year, though its reserves also hold gold, bitcoin and secured loans.

For a payments PM, that means the issuer earns almost nothing on a pass-through payment: about 20 cents an hour on the importer's $50,000 while the coin lived. Its money comes from coins that sit, which is why issuers pay distributors to keep them. The float also dwarfs the fees. By my rough arithmetic, interest on USDT and USDC comes to about $9 billion a year, against perhaps $0.2-1.1 billion of fees on business payments, so the float pool is something like 8 to 40 times larger, on inputs that are themselves estimates.

That float is being competed away. Open USD, which Bridge issues, pays its partners all the reserve earnings less a small fee and charges nothing to mint or redeem. Paxos says it passes up to 100% of USDG's reserve revenue to partners, and in September 2026 Circle signed a five-year incentive deal with Binance. Whoever owns the customer is taking the interest.

The GENIUS Act bars issuers from paying interest to holders. It doesn't stop an exchange paying rewards, which is why Coinbase can, and why the line between rewards and interest stalled the market-structure bill in the Senate. A company holding coins gives up the 3.75-4.00% it could earn on cash after the Fed's September 2026 rise.

How companies of different sizes use it

Nobody publishes stablecoin spending by company size, and I found too little to estimate it, so this is what each size does, from the evidence I have.

A startup (under 50 people), usually a marketplace, payouts fintech or card program, builds on an orchestrator's API (Bridge, BVNK, Circle) and doesn't hold coins for long; one stablecoin card-issuing startup reported more than 200 companies on its platform in January 2026. A founder or CTO owns it, paying roughly 0.1-1.5% of each flow to providers, and it moves on when one corridor needs another ramp or a partner bank starts asking questions.

A scale-up (about 50 to 500 people), often a payroll or payout platform, adds a stablecoin option for contractors who want dollars and starts holding balances, which puts it in money-transmission territory.

A mid-market company (about 500 to 2,000 people) with suppliers abroad pays through a provider, holds little, and compares against non-bank FX at roughly 0.24-0.9%.

An enterprise (about 2,000 to 10,000 people) mostly watches. In the Association for Financial Professionals' 2026 survey, 1% of US organizations were using or piloting stablecoins and 9% were exploring. Its banks offer 24/7 clearing and tokenized deposits that keep treasury inside the banking system.

A Fortune 500 company (revenue above about $7.5 billion) uses stablecoins for payouts and acceptance, if at all; I found no sourced example of one holding them as treasury. Meta pays some creators in Colombia and the Philippines in USDC through Stripe, without converting on its side, according to Polygon's CEO as reported in April 2026. Group treasury owns the question, and the board's view of crypto risk sets the pace.

What changes as a company grows: