USDC vs USDT for Payments: Which Stablecoin Should a Business Accept?

USDT (Tether) and USDC (Circle) are both dollar-pegged stablecoins, and both let a business get paid in something that holds its value between the sale and the settlement. But they are not interchangeable when you are the one accepting them. The differences that matter for a merchant are reserve quality, attestation cadence, regulatory posture, and which chains they are cheap to move on — not which has the larger market cap.

The short answer

For accepting payments in the US and EU, USDC is generally the safer default: it publishes monthly third-party attestations, holds reserves in cash and short-dated US Treasuries, and is issued by a US-regulated company that has leaned into compliance frameworks like MiCA. USDT has the deepest liquidity and widest exchange support globally, which matters if your counterparties are international, but its reserve disclosures are less granular. Furlpay settles in USDC on Arbitrum for exactly these reasons.

Why reserve transparency matters to a merchant

When you accept a stablecoin, you are briefly holding a claim on the issuer's reserves. If the peg wobbles because the market doubts those reserves, you eat the difference on money you have already earned. USDC's monthly attestations and Treasury-heavy reserves make that tail risk easier to reason about. This is the same reason we wrote about reserve transparency and MiCA — the compliance posture is not paperwork, it is what backs the dollar you just got paid.

The chain matters as much as the coin

A stablecoin is only as cheap to accept as the network it settles on. USDC on Ethereum mainnet can cost several dollars in gas per transfer; the same USDC on Arbitrum costs a fraction of a cent. That is why Furlpay settles USDC on Arbitrum One (Chain ID 42161) rather than mainnet — the coin is dollar-stable and the rail is sub-cent. Read USDC on Arbitrum for the integration details.

So which should you accept?

• Selling mostly to US and EU customers, or care about audit and compliance: accept USDC.
• Selling to a global, crypto-native audience that already holds USDT on exchanges: supporting USDT can reduce customer friction.
• Either way, settle on a low-fee chain like Arbitrum — the network choice affects your cost more than the coin choice does.

Market cap tells you how popular a stablecoin is. Attestations and reserves tell you how safe it is to be paid in one. For a merchant, the second question is the one that costs money.

This article is informational and not financial or legal advice. Stablecoins carry issuer and peg risk and are not deposit-insured. Compare how acceptance works on our payments and merchant pages.