Press
Press and media resources
Everything you need to cite this dataset accurately, including the parts of it we cannot stand behind.
What StablecoinSpend is
StablecoinSpend is an independent directory of businesses that accept stablecoin payments, and the research programme built on top of it. Every merchant record is compiled from primary sources — the merchant's own site, its payment documentation, or its payment provider's — and carries the evidence, the method and the date of the check on the public page.
We are not affiliated with Circle, Tether, PayPal, Ripple, Coinbase, any blockchain foundation, or any payment provider profiled on the site. No issuer or gateway funds the research, reviews it before publication, or has any influence over what a record says. Where a commercial relationship exists it is labelled on the page it appears on.
The site began in August 2026. It is small and says so: the figures below describe the merchants we have found and verified, not every merchant on earth that accepts stablecoins.
What the Stablecoin Spend Index measures
The Index is a set of figures computed from the merchant directory at build time. No number on the site is typed in by hand, which means a statistic cannot drift from the records it describes and a report written months ago cannot quietly become false.
It measures five things:
- Coverage — merchants researched, currently accepting, verified.
- Adoption — which stablecoins, networks, categories and countries appear.
- Disclosure — how many merchants decline to say which coin or which chain. This is the most useful set of numbers here and the least flattering.
- Structure — how many accept through a gateway versus a wallet they control.
- Evidence — sources cited, and how many records rest on third-party reporting alone.
It does not measure transaction volume, merchant revenue, or the value settled in stablecoins. Nobody outside a payment processor can measure those, and we would rather publish nothing than publish an estimate dressed as data.
Headline statistics
Current as at . These update whenever the site is rebuilt, so a figure you copy today may differ from one taken next month — which is why each sentence carries its own date.
- Merchants researched
- 109
- Documented acceptance
- 102
- Fully verified
- 63
- Sources cited
- 235
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85.3% of merchants with documented stablecoin acceptance in the StablecoinSpend dataset accept USDC (87 of 102, as of 2026-09-22).
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58.8% of merchants with documented stablecoin acceptance in the StablecoinSpend dataset accept USDT (60 of 102, as of 2026-09-22).
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44.1% of merchants with documented stablecoin acceptance in the StablecoinSpend dataset do not publish which blockchain network they settle on (45 of 102, as of 2026-09-22).
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3.8% of live merchant records in the StablecoinSpend dataset confirm crypto acceptance without naming a single stablecoin (4 of 106, as of 2026-09-22).
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69.6% of merchants with documented stablecoin acceptance in the StablecoinSpend dataset accept through a third-party payment gateway rather than a wallet they control (71 of 102, as of 2026-09-22).
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61.8% of merchants with documented stablecoin acceptance in the StablecoinSpend dataset carry a completed editorial verification inside the six-month freshness window (63 of 102, as of 2026-09-22).
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235 primary sources are cited across the directory (StablecoinSpend dataset, 109 records, as of 2026-09-22).
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2 merchants are recorded as having withdrawn stablecoin payment after previously offering it (StablecoinSpend dataset, 109 records, as of 2026-09-22).
How to cite us
Use of these figures is free and needs no permission. We ask only for attribution and a date, because an undated share from a growing dataset stops being true.
Suggested citation
Three things we would appreciate you doing, and one we would ask you not to.
- Carry the denominator. "77% of merchants in the StablecoinSpend dataset" is accurate. "77% of merchants" is not, and is the version that gets repeated.
- Carry the date. The dataset grows, so shares move.
- Link the methodology if you have room. It is at /research-methodology/.
- Please do not present this as a measure of the stablecoin payments market as a whole. It is a census of what we have found and checked. We say so on every report and would rather be quoted narrowly than widely.
Data, charts and assets
The full dataset is downloadable and the charts are embeddable. An embed keeps showing current figures rather than freezing on the day you published, which is the reason to embed one instead of screenshotting it.
The StablecoinSpend name and mark may be used to identify us when reporting on our research. Please do not alter the mark's proportions or colours, and please do not use it in a way that implies we endorse a product.
Latest reports
Media contact
Email hello@stablecoinspend.com with "Press" in the subject line. We will answer factual questions about the methodology, provide a figure with its underlying records, or run a specific query against the dataset for a story.
What we will not do is provide a comment on the price or prospects of any stablecoin, or an estimate we cannot derive from the data. If a question needs a number we do not have, we will say so rather than approximate one.