Solana Price at $115.23, Samsung Brings USDC to 82 Million Galaxy Phones: US Only at Launch

Samsung is building stablecoin transfers into the pre-installed wallet on its Galaxy phones and settling them over the Solana network. The launch is set for the last week of October, it covers 82 million devices, and every one of them sits in the United States. SOL traded at $115.23 on Thursday morning, 3.0 percent below the previous day. If you use a Galaxy device in Germany, you will not get the feature for now. Exactly there the news parts company with its headline.

Samsung Wallet and USDC on Solana: What Was Announced on October 8

The Solana Foundation and Samsung Electronics said on October 8 that Samsung Wallet and Samsung Pay will support stablecoin payments. What gets settled are cross-border money transfers, the stablecoin used is USDC, and settlement runs over Solana in the background. Users are supposed to need neither an exchange account nor a separate wallet app, because the on-ramps and off-ramps into the local currency are built in. The statement sits in the Solana Foundation newsroom.

A stablecoin is a token whose value is pegged to a currency and which is meant to be covered by reserves held against it. USDC is issued by the company Circle and tied to the US dollar. For the user, that means sending a dollar value rather than a fluctuating coin, with the blockchain serving only as the transport layer.

Woncheol Chai, Executive Vice President and head of the digital wallet team in Samsung's mobile division, is quoted in the statement saying stablecoins have the potential to make money move around the world faster and more easily. Lily Liu, president of the Solana Foundation, adds there that what stablecoins have lacked so far is a route into the mass market. Both are statements from the companies involved, not independent assessments.

82 Million Galaxy Devices, All in the US: How Narrow the Launch in the Last Week of October Really Is

The reach sounds large, the cut is narrow. The Foundation names the United States as the only launch market and the last week of October 2026 as the window. Further markets are to follow, explicitly depending on the regulatory requirements in each place. A date for Europe or for Germany does not appear in the statement.

Two figures circulating in press coverage do not appear in the official statement in that form and therefore deserve a caveat. First, a reach of 60 countries for the transfers: the Foundation does not make that claim. Second, custody. Several trade outlets report that Coinbase holds the USDC kept in Samsung Wallet through its institutional arm Coinbase Prime, and point to earlier cooperation between Samsung and Coinbase. The statement itself names no custodian. Anyone weighing the news should file both points as reporting, not as confirmed fact.

The commercially most important point also stays open. Samsung has published no fees. Whether the feature genuinely makes conventional international transfers cheaper cannot be judged without that number, because savings on money transfers come mainly from the exchange-rate spread and from payout fees in the destination country, not from the blockchain's network fees.

Solana Price at $115.23: the News Lands on a Market in Liquidation Mode

The announcement fell into a weak phase for the market. SOL cost $115.23, or 102.91 euros, on Thursday morning, down 3.0 percent within 24 hours and 3.5 percent over the week. The daily range ran from $114.42 to $118.96 and turnover came to $2.93 billion. Bitcoin stood at $82,775 at the same time, Ether at $2,565.53. All values come from CoinGecko as of Thursday morning.

The trigger for the weakness did not come from the crypto sector. According to CoinDesk, forced liquidations jumped 216 percent on October 7 to around $548 million while Bitcoin slipped below $84,000. The causes cited are an escalation in the Strait of Hormuz and an oil price above $101 a barrel of Brent. A liquidation is the forced closing of a leveraged position once the collateral posted no longer covers it. Waves like that move prices regardless of news about individual projects.

That is what the reaction to the Samsung news shows: there was practically none. SOL moved in lockstep with Bitcoin and Ether. Judge a piece of news by the price move on a day like that and you are measuring the oil quote along with it. How far spreads drift apart between individual venues shows in a look at the crypto exchange comparison, because spread and fees differ markedly in liquidation phases in particular.

$5.25 Trillion in Stablecoin Volume: What Samsung Changes About Solana's Payment Rail

The Foundation gives two figures for context in the same statement. The stablecoin volume issued on Solana is up by just under 20 percent year on year, and more than $5.25 trillion in stablecoin transfers moved across the network in 2026 alone. Against that backdrop, the Samsung tie-in is not a leap into a new line of business but an additional route into a rail that is already running.

The structural difference lies in the kind of user. So far the stablecoin volume on Solana has come mostly from trading between crypto addresses. A pre-installed wallet on a mass-market phone reaches people who do not want to open an exchange account or manage a seed phrase. A seed phrase is the sequence of words that restores access to a self-custodied wallet. Remove that hurdle and usage shifts from trading towards payment.

For Solana as a network that counts, because payment traffic brings steadier load than trading spikes. For the price the link is weaker than the headline suggests. If you want to use stablecoin payments in everyday life, the overview of crypto credit cards lists the routes available today in Germany that work without a wallet integration of this kind.

SOL Is Not USDC: Payment Volume and Demand for the Token Are Two Different Things

This is where the most common false conclusion about news of this type sits. Sending USDC through Samsung Wallet buys no SOL. It moves a dollar token across a blockchain whose fees are charged in SOL. Those fees are very low, on the order of fractions of a cent per transaction. Even a great many transfers therefore create only small direct demand for the token.

The link is more indirect and runs through three stages: more payment traffic means more stablecoin balances held on Solana, more balances mean more applications built on top of them, and only out of that does demand for blockspace arise. Any of those stages can fail to materialise. No price target can be derived from the news, and serious analysts do not derive one at this point either.

What does hold up is the network side, and it can be measured directly. A query to the public Solana node returned an inflation rate of 3.61 percent for the current epoch, 1052. Of a total supply of 635,460,122 SOL, 439,005,453 SOL are tied up as active stake, which is 69.1 percent. That works out to a nominal staking yield of around 5.2 percent before costs and before tax. Those numbers describe the starting position into which an additional payment application grows.

MiCA and E-Money Tokens: Which USDC Variant Is Authorised in Germany

The launch being limited to the US has a regulatory core. The European Union has applied the Markets in Crypto-Assets Regulation, MiCA for short, since 2024. A stablecoin pegged to a single currency counts there as an e-money token and may only be issued by an authorised institution. Circle obtained that authorisation in July 2024 through the French supervisor ACPR according to consistent industry accounts, which puts USDC among the few stablecoins with full MiCA authorisation.

Two limitations matter here and are regularly overlooked. First, the authorisation covers native USDC, not bridged variants running on other chains under labels such as USDC.e. A bridged variant is a representation of the original held by a bridge, and legally it is not the same instrument. Second, the larger competitor USDT has not applied for the authorisation required, which is why several venues have delisted it in the European Economic Area.

Which entity exactly is registered as the issuer is reported inconsistently by the available sources, in part as Circle SAS, in part as Circle Mint Europe SAS. If you depend on that detail, look up the entry in the register of the European securities regulator ESMA rather than relying on secondary sources.

Holding Period, Tax-Free Threshold and the Anlage SO Form: What Investors in Germany Have to Watch With Stablecoin Payments

Should the feature reach Germany later, one point many users underestimate comes into play. For tax purposes a stablecoin counts as a crypto asset rather than a currency. Every payment made with a stablecoin therefore counts as a disposal within the meaning of Section 23 of the German Income Tax Act, just like swapping Bitcoin for Ether. That applies even when the value of the token has not changed.

In practice, that means three things. The holding period is one year: hold a crypto asset for longer than twelve months and the sale is tax-free. The threshold stands at 1,000 euros and applies to the total gain from all private disposals in a calendar year; once it is reached, the entire gain is taxable and not just the part above it. Taxable gains belong in the Anlage SO form of the income tax return, the schedule for other income.

With a dollar stablecoin a gain arises almost exclusively through the dollar-euro exchange rate. That amount is small per payment, but it adds up with frequent use, and it has to be documented. Since January 1, 2026, the German Crypto Asset Tax Transparency Act has transposed the European reporting obligation DAC8 into German law, so providers report transaction data to the tax authorities. How income from the network itself is treated is set out at length in our article on staking taxes. A planned reform could scrap the holding period for holdings acquired from 2027; so far only a draft stage exists on that, and nobody should plan around it today.

Levels Above and Below: $114.42, $118.96 and the 69.1 Percent in Stake

For the coming days three values are verifiable instead of guessed. On the downside the daily low of $114.42 marks the zone where buyers stepped in on Thursday. On the upside the daily high of $118.96 caps the range, and above it sits the $120 level at which SOL already turned several times in early October. These values describe where trading took place and are not a forecast.

The third value is the more important one, because it moves more slowly. With 69.1 percent of total supply in active stake, a large share of holdings is not immediately sellable. Unstake and you wait until the end of the current epoch, which runs about two days. That buffer dampens selling pressure in fast downward moves and, conversely, also delays reactions to good news.

Against those three values the Samsung news can be checked over the coming weeks. If the price does not leave the range after the actual launch in late October, then for the price the news was what it already was on the day of the announcement: an infrastructure story without immediate price effect.

Samsung Launch in Late October: in Germany the Feature Stays Switched Off

The announcement matters for the network and leaves a German portfolio untouched for now. Three steps are worthwhile all the same.

1. Note the date and check what actually launches. The last week of October is the Foundation's timing, the launch market is the United States. Whether and when Europe follows hangs on local authorisation. If you want to use stablecoins in everyday life before then, the routes available today are in the crypto credit card comparison.
2. Check your own venue on fees and spread. In liquidation phases such as October 7 the spreads drift apart, and precisely then the venue decides your entry price. The terms are in the crypto exchange comparison.
3. Keep the records for every stablecoin payment. Every payment is a taxable event, and the 1,000-euro threshold applies to all private disposals together. Which tools log that automatically shows in the crypto tax software comparison.

(As of October 8, 2026. This article is not investment advice. Prices and fee structures change; check the terms with the provider before you buy.)