Context
In markets where the local currency wobbles, dollars are less an investment than a utility, and stablecoins have made reaching for them digital. Circle needed to understand what would make USDC trustworthy enough to enter these markets more directly: not in theory, but at the moment someone converts a paycheck or a business settles an invoice.
Method
Three instruments, layered. A cross-country survey to size attitudes and usage. In-person field research with consumers and businesses in Brazil and Indonesia. And expert interviews with the people who run the rails: exchange operators, fintech founders, treasury leads. The survey told us what; the fieldwork told us why.
What we found
The ramp is the product.
End users judged a dollar stablecoin almost entirely by how easily they could get in and out of it: how findable the fiat ramps were, in person and online. Reserves, attestations, and issuer reputation mattered to the experts. To users, trust was a location question. If the way out is visible, the money feels safe.
A dollar to spend, not a dollar to keep.
The industry story casts stablecoins in these markets as a store of value: digital dollars under the mattress. Usage said otherwise. People treated them primarily as a medium of exchange, a way to move and settle value, with holding as the exception. That inverts what a go-to-market should emphasize as the purpose of USDC accounts.
What we shipped
The research guided Circle's market entry strategy for both countries. The specific choices are Circle's to tell; the public record of its expansion reflects the direction.
Reflection
Most stablecoin theory is written in New York or San Francisco and assumes savings behavior. The fieldwork inverted that assumption in both markets. That is the recurring lesson of cross-cultural payments research: the further a market is from the whitepaper, the more the whitepaper needs the market.
Want the fuller story? hi@abbasjaffer.com