Samsung Wallet Adds Solana and Sui: What It Means for Holders

Samsung is adding crypto payments to the wallet app that already sits on tens of millions of Samsung phones. There’s no separate crypto app and no seed phrase, just a payment option next to your bank cards. The two networks Samsung picked to carry that money are Solana and Sui.

The news landed during a sharp selloff, so it got less attention than it might have. For holders of either coin, there is also a catch: the network can win without the coin you hold winning with it. This article walks through the deal, the numbers behind the headlines, and what to watch next.

What did Samsung announce?

From the end of October, anyone in the US with a Samsung phone will be able to send USDC, a digital dollar, straight from Samsung Wallet. It sits in the same app as their payment cards and ID.

According to the video, the setup has three parts:

Role	Who
Runs the dollar side	Coinbase and Bastion
Licensed custodian holding the dollars	Bastion, which received a national trust bank charter from the OCC
Networks carrying the payments	Solana and Sui

The custodian piece matters. A licensed company holding the dollars is what lets a phone maker put a stablecoin next to people’s bank cards at all. Users will also be able to send dollars abroad and turn them back into regular money without leaving the wallet.

Why does this matter for crypto adoption?

It skips the step where most people give up. For years the hardest part of crypto has been the front door: download an app, write down a seed phrase, move money to an exchange. Samsung’s version puts the payment inside an app people already open every day, so they never have to walk through that door.

It fits a pattern from the same week. South Africa’s First National Bank opened crypto trading to nearly 9 million customers, with XRP, Solana, Bitcoin, Ethereum and USDT. Before that came UniCredit in Italy and Canada’s six largest banks. Each time, crypto shows up inside an app people already trust, and Solana is on every one of those lists.

Is it really 82 million new users?

No. You’ll see the deal posted as “82 million new users.” That number is Samsung’s US phone sales in 2025. It counts devices that could use the feature, not people who will.

Even a small share of those owners sending dollars this way would be a large new group of ordinary people on these networks. But the headline and the number behind it are not the same thing.

Why Solana and Sui, and not Bitcoin or XRP?

The video’s answer is that the two networks are built for different jobs, and Samsung chose both.

• Solana has been working with institutions. JPMorgan is helping it develop a system for financial institutions to settle trades onchain in seconds. Most large trades still take a day or more to settle fully, and money stuck in that gap can’t be used. There is no product name or launch date yet.
• Sui is building for very large numbers of very small payments. Its offchain “tunnels” hit 40.6 million transactions per second in a live stress test simulating AI agents paying each other, a result analyzed by CertiK. Thousands of small payments run offchain and only the final result is recorded on Sui. The last Sui record covered on the channel was 6 million.

Does Samsung’s deal help the SOL and SUI price?

Not much on its own, and this is the catch. What moves across these networks is dollars, not SOL and not SUI. Most people using Samsung Wallet won’t know which network carried their money, and won’t need to.

The networks do earn something. Every transfer pays a small fee in the network’s own coin, so more traffic means more demand for it. But on networks this fast, those fees are fractions of a cent, so traffic alone is unlikely to move the token much.

Sui has acknowledged the problem. At its Basecamp conference, a member of the Sui team described plans to “supercharge” buybacks, using network revenue to buy SUI back from the market. The video presents that as Sui’s attempt to connect network use to the token, not as a guarantee that it will work.

What else happened in crypto this week?

The Samsung news arrived during a rough few days for leveraged traders:

1. Liquidations. Bitcoin fell nearly $2,000 in 20 minutes to about $83,600, and $400 million of leveraged long bets were liquidated in under an hour. Ethereum fell below $2,600. The push came partly from outside crypto, with the 30-year US Treasury yield at its highest since 2002 and oil rising.
2. 3x leveraged ETFs. The SEC approved the first 3x leveraged Bitcoin and Ethereum ETFs in the US. They track CME futures, not actual coins, and aim to move three times as much as the underlying in a single day. A 2.3% drop in Bitcoin is close to 7% in a 3x fund.
3. Coins leaving exchanges. The amount of Bitcoin held on exchanges fell to a 7-month low, a sign more coins are moving into private wallets.
4. BitMine’s ETH cap. Tom Lee said at Token2049 that BitMine holds about 6 million ETH and will stop buying at a 5% “hard cap,” roughly 100,000 ETH away. The video frames this as one of Ethereum’s biggest buyers reaching its own limit, not as a crash signal.
5. Evernorth on Nasdaq. Evernorth, a company built to hold XRP, filed an 8-K putting its Nasdaq debut under the ticker XRPN on or about October 12. That gives people with an ordinary brokerage account a way to buy a company whose business is holding XRP. It is the company, not the coin.

What to watch next

The phones are ready from the end of October. The video’s point is that adoption on the network and value in the token are separate questions, and the second one is answered by slow, unglamorous numbers rather than headlines:

• Sui’s buyback total, and whether it grows as Samsung traffic arrives.
• Stablecoin balances on Solana and Sui.
• Fee revenue on each network, month over month.

If those numbers rise after launch, the adoption is reaching the token. If they stay flat, the networks are carrying dollars while the coins sit still.