Name: Why Asia’s $1 Trillion Stablecoin Shift Is Reshaping Global Finance
Uploaded: 2025-10-16T18:37:16.000Z
Duration: 10 min 40 s
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I'm a believer in stablecoin, believer in blockchain.

If you go back 10 years, there was big tech, there was FinTech, there was BNPL, there was the first wave of crypto, now stablecoins.

Reflexive pronouns

This could be perhaps the greatest revolution in financial technology since the birth of the Internet itself.

For decades, moving money across borders meant banks, wire fees and long waits.

Now imagine doing it near instantly with a few tabs, lower cost and fewer middlemen.

That's the promise from stablecoin advocates.

And in Asia, the digital assets are gaining serious ground.

Whether it's remittance, e commerce, ride hailing payouts, people want cross border payments that are instant, low cost, borderless and convenient.

And stablecoin payments are stepping into that gap, offering the kind of financing efficiency that the traditional systems haven't kept up with.

Of the institutions that we had surveyed, 56% of them have already been engaged in doing StableCoin projects.

And 40% of them are piloting or planning some sort of of stablecoin related projects.

Already in 2024, Asia and the Pacific saw over a trillion dollars worth of stablecoins moving in, out and within the region.

This is more than anywhere else in the world, according to estimates from an IMF working paper.

So what's driving Asia's stablecoin surge?

Cryptocurrency is notoriously volatile, but stablecoins are designed to be a steady alternative.

Digital money packed to the US dollar or assets like gold, and in some cases even other cryptocurrencies.

So stablecoins is a way to be able to send dollars seamlessly and securely anywhere in the world.

24, 7 as easy as it sends an email in the region, real world adoption is accelerating, driven by businesses, workers and governments.

If you look at all of the countries within Asia Pacific, they either already have established regulatory frameworks like we've seen seen in Singapore, Hong Kong.

And that's probably the first sign to be able to build businesses using stablecoins.

They can have regulatory clarity and that's already paved the way for a lot of the adoptions.

Remittances remain one of the clearest use cases for stablecoins in Asia.

According to the World Bank, India, China and the Philippines are among the top global recipients of remittance payments among low and middle income countries.

In 2024, India alone received 129 billion from abroad.

Philippines is a market where a lot of the economy is powered by foreign domestic workers and helpers that send funds from where they work back home to support their families.

And if you look at the details of what these domestic helpers are paying per transaction, it's actually quite hefty.

So if you can influence what the average person on the street is having issues over, I think that's a very good starting point given the fact that there are huge gig economy workers to be based there, as well as a lot of migrant workers traveling across different parts of Asia.

So very commonly we see that payment service providers in other regions who have a lot of flows going in and out are actually working with a lot of these digital exchange players.

Some examples include facilitating the last step in the payment process known as last mile payouts, the exchange between stablecoins and government issued currency and creating links between the Internet of today and tomorrow, bringing in what we consider the Web3 industry and the Web2 industry together to process cross border flows.

Singapore is seeing some of the highest stablecoin flows in the world moving nearly as much as the U.S.

The Singapore China route has emerged as one of the busiest corridors for stablecoin flows in Asia.

When China keeps a firm grip on its capital control and the ban on cryptocurrencies for many Chinese companies dealing with cross border businesses, they would set up entities in offshore cities like Hong Kong or Singapore and they use these offshore entities to accept crypto payments from their global clients.

As of 2025, XSGD was one of the world's largest non US dollar stablecoins in circulation in the world as we see travel becoming a major part of this region in November last year.

In 2024 we went live with Alipay and GREP with a solution which would allow Alipay users from overseas coming to Singapore to use their Alipay wallet in Singapore on Grab's platform.

On our platform on the PayNow ecosystem which has access to more than 50,000 payment merchant points.

As stablecoin adoption grows, regulators are racing to keep pace, setting rules that could determine how trusted and widely used they become in the region.

Singapore MAS act on stablecoin is perhaps one of the earliest that came into effect.

This is considered one of the gold standards.

It also mandates settlement within five days.

And it is something that looks at not just the Singapore dollar stablecoin, but

it's also covering the G10 currency stablecoin, the Hong Kong version which came into effect earlier this year, does cover single currency stablecoin.

It also covers a basket of currency stablecoins.

In a way it is to some extent similar, but

it could be a bit different in terms of the product and the regulatory standards as well.

But it's not just about sending money overseas.

In the second quarter of 2024, merchants in Singapore processed nearly 1 billion in crypto payments.

And even the fashion brands are experimenting with stablecoins.

Charles and Keith, a Singaporean fashion brand that creates collections of handbags and shoes, are allowing consumers to pay online and shop online using stablecoins.

That's a move for the company to target global consumers who are digital savvy and see crypto as part of their everyday life.

The luxury hotel group Capella has also been allowing customers to book expensive stays using digital assets like USDT or usdc.

The company sees it as a way to attract the high net worth individuals who value privacy, currency flexibility, convenience and the higher upper limits on transaction values.

Popular Asian super apps like grab, Kakao and WeChat, which already bundle services from right handling to payments, could also be key to driving wider adoption.

To give you an example, today your Grab app, you can actually top it up using xsgd.

What that means is that if you are investor in the crypto space, you can actually bring those assets that you have in Singapore dollar form so you don't lose any foreign exchange impact.

That allows you to go to any merchant, scan and pay.

In parts of Southeast and South Asia, access to traditional banking is still limited, but

Stablecoins offer a way to store value digitally that's especially useful in countries facing political or economic instability, helping to protect against sharp currency fluctuations.

But can stablecoins deliver the same reliability people expect from banks?

I would argue that a lot of the emerging economies where people might not feel the same way towards their central bank as well as their government, where they maybe had experienced hyperinflation or dilution, they're naturally gravitating towards stablecoins because stablecoins is fully backed.

And in some ways there's a different kind of of financial risks that you undertake.

And depending on where you are in the world, your perception of that trust may be really different.

All the population living in emerging markets, developing countries where people that are underbanked are now or are in Progress to become USDT users.

We have already 500 million users in emerging markets.

They cannot afford very high costly subscriptions to the big tech AI people platforms.

And so our target is always creating technology that serves the underserved.

Major banks like Citi and JP Morgan are launching their own stablecoins while PayPal has already entered the market.

But even institutional backing isn't enough.

Trust remains fragile and public understanding of digital currencies is still limited.

The case with Data back in 2021 was due to a case where there was a transparency currency issues and the false claims on the assets that they were used to back the token of stablecoin.

The findings were such that only 27 or 28% of that dollar was backed by high quality liquid assets.

So this is one thing that may potentially still continue to resurface.

Unwinding that distrust is actually a very big portion as we embark on more use cases that fit into a regulatory first compliance first approach where you have the likes of the world's most trusted organizations coming in.

To build something that is forward looking would be a very good way to bring that trust factor back into action.

If you go back, that's a couple years ago, that was the period of high profile failures and fraud and that kind of thing.

And what's happened is I think, you know, the industry is maturing, our understanding of it is improving and in a sense it's becoming much more mainstream.

Beyond transparency, regulation itself remains fragmented.

In one jurisdiction stablecoins might be treated as payment tools, in another as investment products.

This patchwork creates confusion for both businesses and users.

Scaling stablecoins beyond niche use will hinge on trust and and clear guardrails.

Countries like Singapore, Japan and Hong Kong have frameworks in place.

Others are still weighing where stablecoins fit.

But what's clear is that stablecoins have moved well beyond the pilot phase.

Whether it's anti money laundering across different jurisdictions, whether there is going to be a potential harmonisation of regulations.

Certainly I think there is more that could be done.

The likely outcome for the stable coin coin industry is you and I would not even know what is being powered by stablecoins.

As more economies and regions here launch their own stablecoins, there's an opportunity for them to have direct pairs.

They could build out their own currency to be used in the digital world as well.

Maybe change the paradigm of how all of us are running today, which is very dependent on US dollars.