If you are about to accept stablecoin payments, the first real decision is which stablecoins. The three you will be asked for most often are USDC, USDT and PYUSD. All three are dollar-pegged, but they are issued by different companies, live on different sets of chains, and trade with very different liquidity. Choosing well keeps your reconciliation simple and your customers happy.
The short version
- USDC — issued by Circle. Strong regulatory posture, transparent monthly attestations, broad coverage across most EVM chains plus Solana. The default “safe” choice for merchants and the most common settlement currency.
- USDT — issued by Tether. By far the largest and most liquid stablecoin globally, especially on Tron and in emerging markets. If your customers are international, many of them already hold USDT.
- PYUSD — issued by Paxos for PayPal. Smaller supply and narrower chain coverage today, but it carries PayPal’s brand recognition and is growing on Ethereum and Solana.
A useful mental model: accept all three so you never turn a paying customer away, but settle into one so your books stay clean.
Issuer and trust
The token is only as good as the company holding the reserves. USDC and PYUSD both publish regular attestations and operate under US regulatory frameworks, which is why risk-averse merchants gravitate to them. USDT is enormously liquid and battle-tested but has historically been less transparent about its reserve composition. None of this changes the on-chain mechanics — a transfer is a transfer — but it shapes which token you want to hold at the end of the day.
Chain coverage matters more than you’d think
The “same” stablecoin is a different contract on every chain, and not every issuer deploys everywhere.
- USDC is native on Ethereum, Base, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, Solana and more.
- USDT dominates Tron, which is why so much real-world payment volume settles there — fees are low and the token is everywhere.
- PYUSD is concentrated on Ethereum and Solana.
This is why a merchant guide can’t be separated from a network guide. The token your customer holds and the chain they hold it on are a pair. Browse the live supported chains to see exactly which token lives where in Plaidly today.
Accept widely, settle narrowly. Take whatever your customer brings; convert it to the one currency your finance team wants to see.
Liquidity and conversion
If you accept USDT on Tron but want to settle in USDC on Base, somewhere a conversion has to happen. Liquidity determines how cheap and how slippage-free that conversion is. USDT and USDC are deep and cheap to move between; smaller tokens like PYUSD can cost slightly more to convert at size. A payment gateway abstracts this: you declare your settlement currency once, and each incoming payment is normalized to it.
What we recommend
For most merchants:
- Accept USDC, USDT and PYUSD across the chains your audience actually uses. Turning away a ready buyer over a token preference is the most expensive mistake you can make.
- Settle into USDC unless you have a specific reason not to — it has the best combination of liquidity, transparency and chain coverage.
- Revisit the mix quarterly. Stablecoin market share shifts, and the cheapest network for your customers this quarter may not be next.
Doing this with Plaidly
In Plaidly you set the tokens and chains you’ll accept per payment session, and a single settlement currency for your account. We handle confirmation, normalization and the signed webhook that tells your system money has landed. The exact field names and a copy-pasteable example are in the API reference, and if a particular token or chain pairing isn’t behaving as you expect, support can trace it end to end.
The headline: don’t agonize over USDC vs USDT vs PYUSD as if you must pick one. Accept all three, settle into one, and let the gateway absorb the difference.