Payment network
Stablecoin payments on Stellar
Stellar was designed for payments and cross-border value transfer rather than general-purpose computation, and that focus shows. Transactions settle in a few seconds for a fraction of a cent, the protocol has issued-asset support built in rather than bolted on, and it includes a built-in exchange for converting between assets during a payment. Circle issues USDC and EURC natively on Stellar. Merchant gateway support is narrower than the Ethereum ecosystem, and Stellar's biggest role in stablecoin payments today is in remittance and institutional corridors rather than consumer checkout. Two protocol features catch newcomers out — trustlines, which an account must establish before it can hold a given asset, and memos, which custodial recipients use to identify who a payment belongs to. Neither is a problem if you read the checkout instructions.
Stellar is a payments network first, which makes it technically well suited to this directory’s subject and commercially less represented than you might expect.
Built for the job
Five-second settlement, negligible fees, native support for issued assets, and a built-in decentralised exchange that can convert between assets as part of a payment. That last feature is genuinely useful: a payer holding EURC can pay a merchant expecting USDC in a single operation.
Circle issues both USDC and EURC natively on Stellar, so these are first-class assets rather than bridged wrappers.
Two things that catch people out
Trustlines. Stellar accounts opt in to each asset they hold. A wallet that has never held USDC cannot receive it until a trustline exists. Modern wallets create them automatically when you add an asset, but a payment to a freshly created account can fail for this reason and the error message is not always clear.
Memos. Custodial services frequently share one deposit address across all customers and use the memo to identify yours. Sending without the memo means the funds arrive somewhere real but are not credited to you. Recovering them is a support process, sometimes a slow one, occasionally an unsuccessful one.
Both are consequences of design decisions that make sense for a payments network. Neither is a problem if you read the checkout instructions.
Where you will actually encounter it
Remittance corridors and institutional settlement more than consumer merchant checkout. Gateway support exists but is not broad. If a merchant offers Stellar it works well; do not move funds there speculatively expecting wide acceptance.
Merchants accepting payment on Stellar
No merchants in the directory currently list this network. Browse all merchants to find one on a network you can use.