How to buy USDC

The short version

1. 1

   Quickest. Open the account menu at the top right of any page and choose Add funds. Pay by card, Apple Pay or Google Pay. It arrives in a minute or two, and there is no network to pick.

2. 2

   Cheaper, for larger amounts. Buy USDC on an exchange — Coinbase, Kraken, Binance — and withdraw it to your Stacked address.

3. 3

   If you withdraw from an exchange, choose the Base network. Picking the wrong one is fixable, but you'll pay a fee to fix something that should have cost you nothing.

4. 4

   Already hold USDC somewhere else? Bridge in the same menu moves it onto Base for you.

The rest of this page is each of those, in full.

What USDC actually is

USDC is a dollar issued as a token by a company called Circle. One USDC is meant to be worth one dollar, and it holds that price because every token in circulation is backed by cash and short-dated US government debt that Circle reports on monthly. It doesn't swing around the way Bitcoin or Ethereum do — that is the entire point of it.

Stacked settles in USDC on Base. Base is a network — the road the money travels on, built by Coinbase — and it's the reason a hand can settle in seconds for a fraction of a cent. Once your money is in your account the site shows it to you in plain dollars, and you don't have to think about any of this again.

The quick way: buy it inside Stacked

You never have to leave the site. Everything below happens in the account button at the top right of every page: the rounded pill with your picture, your name, and a small arrow pointing down. Click it and a menu drops open. On a phone there's no room for the pill, so the same menu sits behind the ☰ button in the top right.

Choose Add funds. What opens is already set to buy USDC on Base, so there's no currency and no network for you to choose — the two things people get wrong are made for you.

1. 1

   Type the amount you want, in dollars.

2. 2

   Pick how you're paying — card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, or out of crypto you already hold elsewhere.

3. 3

   Confirm. A minute or two later the balance beside your name goes up, and you can sit down at any table.

Convenience is what you pay for here. A card purchase carries a processing fee of a few percent, and above a certain amount the payment provider will ask you to verify your identity. For topping up fifty dollars that's the least hassle available. For five hundred, the exchange route below is usually meaningfully cheaper.

The cheaper way: buy on an exchange

An exchange is where you turn your own currency into crypto. It costs less than paying by card, and it takes longer the first time because somebody has to check who you are.

1. 1

   Pick one that serves your country and supports Base. Coinbase, Kraken and Binance are the usual answers. Check that Base appears in that exchange's list of withdrawal networks for USDC before you put money in — not every exchange offers it, and finding out afterwards is how people end up stuck.

2. 2

   Verify your identity. Name, date of birth, address, a photo of an ID, sometimes a selfie. Approval is often instant and occasionally takes a day or two. Turn on two-factor authentication — an app like Google Authenticator rather than text messages — before you deposit anything.

3. 3

   Deposit your own money. A bank transfer is cheapest and takes one to three days. A debit card is instant and costs the most. The fee is shown at checkout; look at it before you confirm.

4. 4

   Buy USDC. A market order fills straight away at the going rate, which for something pegged to a dollar is the only order type worth bothering with. Several exchanges charge no trading fee on USDC at all.

5. 5

   Withdraw it to Stacked. That's the next section, and it's the part to read slowly.

Withdrawing to Stacked: choose Base

First you need your address — where the money is going. Open the account menu and choose Send & receive. Your address is the long string starting 0x at the top. Copy it with the button beside it rather than typing it out.

Then, on the exchange, choose to withdraw USDC, paste the address in, and find the box asking which network to send over.

It's worth knowing how bad each wrong answer actually is, because the horror stories you'll read elsewhere don't all apply here.

Another Ethereum-style network — Ethereum itself, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon, BNB Chain. Annoying, not fatal. Your Stacked address is the same string on all of them, so the money lands somewhere you control: it shows up on your wallet screen, and Bridge in the account menu moves it across to Base. You have simply paid a bridge fee for nothing. Pick Ethereum and that fee can be a real sting — this is the expensive mistake, not the terminal one.

An Ethereum-style network we don't list. Same story, in that the address is still yours, but the site won't show you the balance or move it for you. That one is a message in Discord rather than a button.

Solana, Tron, or anything else not built like Ethereum. This is the one that's final. Those networks use a completely different address format, so an address starting 0x means nothing on them. Nearly every exchange refuses the withdrawal for that exact reason, which is the safety net that catches most people — but if one lets it through, nobody can reverse it.

If Base isn't in the exchange's list at all, withdraw over a network you can bridge from and accept the fee, or skip the exchange and use Add funds instead.

Two habits worth having, both of which cost you a minute and have saved other people a great deal more. When the amount is large, send a small test first and wait for it to land before you send the rest. And after you paste the address, check that the first four and the last four characters on screen match the ones you copied — there is malware whose only job is to swap crypto addresses on your clipboard.

Already have USDC somewhere else

If you already hold USDC on Ethereum, Arbitrum, Optimism, Polygon or BNB Chain, you don't need to buy any. Open the account menu and choose Bridge: pick where the money is now, confirm, and it moves onto Base — usually within a couple of minutes, for a small fee. The same screen will also swap other crypto you're holding into USDC.

This is also the way out if you withdrew from an exchange over the wrong network. Same screen, same couple of minutes — you just paid a fee you didn't need to.

What it actually costs

Fees stack up in three places, and it's worth knowing which is which so you can tell an expensive route from a cheap one.

1. 1

   Buying it. The big one. Paying by card typically costs a few percent; an exchange trading fee is a fraction of one, and is sometimes zero on USDC.

2. 2

   Moving it. An exchange withdrawal fee on Base is usually somewhere between nothing and a dollar. The same withdrawal over Ethereum can cost many times that — a second reason to pick Base.

3. 3

   Playing with it. Effectively nothing. Transactions on Base cost fractions of a cent.

One thing you'll read about elsewhere and can ignore here: you do not need to hold ETH to pay network fees on Stacked. We cover them. There's nothing to top up and nothing separate to buy.

Mistakes that cost money

1. 1

   Not checking the address after you paste it. The one truly irreversible item on this list. A wrong network costs you a bridge fee; a wrong address costs you the lot.

2. 2

   The wrong network. Recoverable, but you'll pay to recover it — and if you picked something that isn't Ethereum-shaped at all, you won't.

3. 3

   Skipping two-factor authentication on the exchange. Your money sits there while you buy. A password on its own is not enough.

4. 4

   Anyone who asks for a recovery phrase or a private key. In a DM, in a support chat, on a site that looks like ours — they are robbing you. No real support desk asks, and we never will.

5. 5

   Reaching an exchange through a search ad or a link someone sent you. Type the address in yourself. Fake front doors are the most common way people lose an exchange account.

6. 6

   Treating a stablecoin as risk-free. It's stable, not guaranteed.

Then sit down

Once it lands it's spendable at any table straight away — nothing else to convert, nothing to approve. See who's playing right now.

Won something and wondering where it went? You won a prize. What now?