Most Americans still do not know what a stablecoin is. Offer them the safety net of a bank account, however, and a majority say they would use one.

That is the central finding of Visa's Money Travels 2026 report, released Wednesday. In a hypothetical scenario in which stablecoins came with bank-level fraud protection and deposit insurance, the share of Americans willing to use them for international transfers jumped from 36% to 56%, the payments giant said.

Stablecoins are cryptocurrencies pegged to a stable asset—usually the U.S. dollar—and are designed to avoid Bitcoin-style price swings. They do not carry FDIC insurance, the coverage that protects U.S. bank deposits up to $250,000 per depositor if a bank fails. And while the GENIUS Act, signed into law in July 2025, created the first federal framework for payment stablecoins, it does not extend deposit insurance to them. Visa stressed that its hypothetical scenario does not signal that such protections currently exist or are on the way.

Familiarity remains the bigger hurdle. Some 56% of U.S. respondents said they had never heard of stablecoins, and many of those who had heard of them wrongly assumed they fluctuate in value like Bitcoin. For a product designed to work as everyday money, that makes awareness the first gate.

The provider matters as well. Interest rose to 45% when stablecoins were offered through an existing financial provider. Roughly six in 10 Americans said they would trust a traditional bank (61%) or a global payment network (60%) to provide digital currency services. Visa, of course, is one of the latter.

The pattern held beyond the United States. In Latin America, willingness more than doubled, from 34% to 74%, when protections were factored in. The stakes are high there: remittances are a financial lifeline for many households, and cross-border payments are among the most frequently cited use cases for stablecoins, with global average transfer fees running near 6%, according to World Bank tracking. Morning Consult conducted the survey between Feb. 24 and March 2, polling 45,445 people across 20 markets, including 2,192 U.S. adults.

Scams loom large, too. Some 36% of U.S. remitters said they had encountered a cross-border payment scam, and 44% worry about AI deepfakes impersonating family members.

"Our research shows what matters most to those who rely on that lifeline: trust," said Vira Platonova, global head of Visa Direct.

Visa has been laying stablecoin rails for years. Its stablecoin settlement volume has hit an annualized rate above $20 billion, up from a $3.5 billion run rate when it began settling U.S. transactions in USDC on Solana last December. August, Visa Direct added stablecoin payouts through Zerohash.

Wall Street is watching as well. BlackRock put the stablecoin market's capitalization above $300 billion this month, with more than $11 trillion in adjusted transaction volume last year. The asset manager believes AI agents will drive the next wave of adoption for stablecoins and crypto at large. Against that buildout, the survey's numbers suggest the missing ingredient for consumers is not capability but confidence.