Visa Survey: Stablecoin Interest Jumps to 56% With Hypothetical “Bank-Level”

American interest in using stablecoins jumps from 36% to 56% when paired with hypothetical bank-level fraud protection and deposit insurance, a Visa survey of 2,192 U.S. adults found. The lift tells you less about stablecoins and more about what Americans expect from the bank account they already have.

In practice, "bank-level" means two things: fraud protection, the kind that reimburses a customer when a card is used without permission, and deposit insurance, the federal backstop that pays out when a bank fails. Neither exists on a stablecoin today. Tether's USDT and Circle's USDC, at about $183.4 billion and $76 billion respectively, make up the bulk of the more than $295 billion of U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin supply. If their issuers ran into trouble, holders would stand in line with other unsecured creditors, not file an FDIC claim.

The Visa report, titled Money Travels 2026, was based on a Morning Consult survey conducted between February 24 and March 2 of this year. Respondents were given definitions of key terms, including what a stablecoin is, before answering, per a Visa statement shared with The Block.

The hypothetical framing

The "bank-level" protections in the survey are explicitly hypothetical. The questions describe conditions attached to a scenario, not protections currently available on any stablecoin product.

What the survey did test, separately: willingness to use a stablecoin offered through an existing financial provider. That smaller lift moved the number from 36% to 45%, nine points lower than the bank-level version. The provider matters more than the technology to most respondents. Sixty-four percent said trust depends more on the payment provider than on the underlying rails.

Who's trusted to issue the dollars

When asked which providers they would trust with digital currency services, 61% of respondents named traditional commercial banks, and 60% named global payment networks. Visa, the survey's sponsor, is one of the latter. The overlap is worth flagging: earlier in September the company said its stablecoin settlement had surpassed a $20 billion annualized run rate, more than 15 times the year-earlier figure, with more than 160 stablecoin-linked card programs live globally.

The Limits of the Survey

The article did not disclose the survey's margin of error, weighting methodology, or confidence interval. It also did not say whether Money Travels 2026 covers markets beyond the U.S. or when Visa itself published the report.

One finding lands harder than the adoption headline. Fifty-six percent of U.S. respondents said they had never heard of stablecoins. Some of those who had heard of them incorrectly assumed stablecoins fluctuate like bitcoin. The number who say they would use them is being counted off a base that mostly does not know what they are.