Elon Musk is looking for a cheaper route for sending money to creators. According to CoinDesk from 20 August, X is considering paying creators in stablecoins, with USDC from Circle among the tokens under consideration. X did not respond to a request for comment and has not confirmed the method or the network.
The timing is no accident. X is ending its Revenue Sharing program and from 8 September is replacing it with the Original Content Rewards program. The last day on which participants in the old model earn is 7 September. When a platform is rebuilding its entire payout mechanism, it is a logical moment to touch the rail itself, the route along which the money flows.
What X is changing and why now
The old model rewarded engagement under posts. The new one targets original content. Allegra Jacchia of X said that the program “had reached a point where its incentives were misaligned”, and that the company had decided “to start fresh and build a program designed from day one to reward originality”. Original reporting, a creator's own photos and videos, graphics and commentary should qualify. Content that is copied or re-uploaded “without meaningful transformation” will not be counted.
The entry bar is high. According to the program rules, a creator needs at least 500 verified followers, at least 500,000 impressions on the main timeline from verified users over the last 90 days, and a Premium subscription. X wants to put a stablecoin into this framework as a possible payout rail. For now it is only an idea, and no parameters have been finalised.
Meta has been testing the same route since spring
X would not be the first. In April Meta launched USDC payouts to selected creators in Colombia and the Philippines. Creators connect a crypto wallet, for example MetaMask, Phantom or Binance, and receive USDC directly in it. The money flows over the Polygon and Solana networks, and Stripe handles the payment infrastructure.
The scale is large. Meta is expanding earnings for original creators on Facebook, and according to its partner Polygon Labs it paid creators almost $3 billion in 2025 across Facebook's monetisation programs. Through Stripe it expects to extend payouts to more than 160 markets by the end of 2026.
It will not, however, mint its own stablecoin. A Meta spokesperson summed it up: “we strive to offer the most relevant payment methods, which is why we are exploring how stablecoins could become part of our suite of options”. The company turned to USDC from Circle, the second-largest stablecoin, with a market capitalisation of over $77 billion.
Why a stablecoin instead of a bank
A bank transfer to Colombia or the Philippines passes through several intermediaries, each taking a fee, and takes a few days. A stablecoin delivers a dollar to a wallet quickly and at lower cost, especially in countries with weaker banking infrastructure. For a platform sending billions of dollars to hundreds of thousands of creators around the world, the payout rail becomes a cost item that is worth optimising.
The catch stays on the creator's side. Meta does not provide a service for converting USDC into local currency. The creator receives dollars in a token and must exchange them into pesos on their own. The fast and cheap route ends at the wallet. The last mile into the local economy is the creator's problem.
Europe is waiting for the details for now
For European creators this is context for now, not a payout slip. Meta's pilot countries lie outside Europe, and X has published no parameters. Stablecoins pegged to a single currency also fall under the MiCA regulation in the EU as e-money tokens, whose issuer must be authorised and meet the technical standards of the EBA and ESMA. Extending them to the EU will therefore be more than a technical switch. The concrete impact on payouts to European creators will depend on how platforms resolve regulation and conversion into local currency.
The direction is readable from here too. Platforms now compete for creators not only with the size of their advertising revenue share, but also with how quickly and cheaply they deliver money to them. The market that Goldman Sachs estimates will grow from $250 billion in 2023 to $480 billion by 2027, with around 50 million creators worldwide, is big enough to make rebuilding the payout infrastructure worthwhile.
Competition for creators is playing out on several layers at once. YouTube has moved from algorithmic rewards to direct funding of shows and shares of brand deals. Meta and X are working on a different layer of the same thing. The question is not how much to pay creators, but by what route.
This is the logic of the European market, where creators have long worked as suppliers for global platforms. A supply chain is optimised from the bottom up, starting with the rail along which the money flows.
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