SAN FRANCISCO–A new analysis reveals the clear reason why some of the nation’s largest retailers say they are exploring issuing stablecoins for payments: big gains to the bottom line.
A 1% shift from highest-cost tender to a retailer-issued, closed-loop prepaid stablecoin would save Amazon $1.5 billion annually, Apple $1 billion annually and Walmart $783-million annually, according to Richard Crone of Crone Consulting, an independent advisory firm specializing in helping businesses integrate mobile self-service capabilities.
Big Retailers Exploring Option
As the CU Daily reported here, the retailers listed above along with many others, including companies in the travel industry, are all exploring how they might potentially use stablecoins to handle payments and other transactions in order to avoid interchange fees.
According to Crone, a retailer-issued stablecoin would functionally be a merchant-branded, closed-loop prepaid gift card—only spendable at that retailer.
“That makes it the lowest-cost, highest-loyalty tender,” Crone wrote. “No interchange. Prepaid with no chargebacks. Fully owned 1st-party data.”
Crone noted retailers could easily target the 66% of consumers who buy digital gift cards for self-use, such as the 34 million active Starbucks app users who currently have $1.8 billion in prepaid balances—or increase sales from the 61% who spend $32 more than the prepaid card’s face value.
More Than Just Payments
“An open blockchain stablecoin can carry more than tokenized payment credentials—it can embed opt-in preferences, attribution audit trails and agentically activated offers, enabling CPG-funded OMI and OMV promotional offers to incentivize the retailer’s preferred prepaid tender with increasing customer lifetime value,” Crone stated. “Retailer-issued stablecoins integrated into their own agentic-enabled retailer app are both a defensive & offensive move to protect against disintermediation from agentic payments, and a second chance to build an interoperable merchant-owned payments network. Without it, Agent-as-a-Wallet platforms (AI-driven shopping UIs) like Visa Intelligent Commerce, Mastercard Agent Pay, Google Shop With AI, Amazon BuyforMe, PayPal Agentic Toolkit, and soon Apple Pay and Meta Pay, will disintermediate them at checkout, where the UI controls both discovery and tender selection.”
How to Win
To win, said Crone, merchants must:
- Launch their own branded prepaid stablecoin
- Embed it within their own app
- Use agentic UX to steer payment behavior & retain ownership of checkout
