Stablecoins in Southeast Asia: Evolution not revolution

Stablecoins won't replace cross-border payments in Asia, but they could fix the most expensive routes.

When a business in Kuala Lumpur pays a supplier in Shenzhen through the banks, the money can still take days to arrive, with fees and an exchange-rate margin taken along the way. That’s the problem stablecoins are being pitched to solve, and Asia’s regulators are now taking them seriously.

In September, the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) proposed recognising a limited number of overseas-issued stablecoins for wholesale cross-border payments, provided they’re regulated to comparable standards. Only stablecoins that meet MAS’s requirements on reserves and redemption would be able to call themselves “MAS-regulated”. A month later, the Hong Kong Money Authority (HKMA) and Bank Negara Malaysia agreed to set up a joint workstream on compliant cross-border stablecoin payments between Hong Kong and Malaysia. Malaysia is also piloting ringgit stablecoins and tokenised deposits for wholesale payments.

The volumes are still small, but Asia is where they’re growing. McKinsey and Artemis estimate that stablecoin payments were running at around US$390 billion a year at the end of 2025, or about 0.02% of global payments. Roughly 60% was business-to-business, and about US$245 billion was sent from Asia, led by Singapore, Hong Kong and Japan.

Why Asia, and why now?

A company in the euro area can trade with most of its neighbours in a single currency. In Asia, cross-border trade almost always means changing currency, often more than once. Every day a payment spends moving between correspondent banks is a day the exchange rate can move against you. Settling in minutes rather than days has real value here, which goes a long way to explaining why interest in stablecoins is stronger in Asia than in Europe or the US.

Where the savings are, and aren’t

Stablecoins won’t transform every cross-border payment. Providers such as Wise and Airwallex have already made international transfers cheaper and faster for many smaller businesses. The bigger gains are in regular, higher-value payments on routes that still rely on correspondent banking, where a small saving on each transfer adds up over a year.

The catch is the last mile. A supplier in Thailand pays its bills in baht, not in dollar-backed stablecoins. Someone has to convert the stablecoins and pay the money into a Thai bank account, and the rate they use comes out of what the supplier receives. A stablecoin payment is only as cheap as that final step, so any comparison with a bank transfer has to include it.

Who answers when something goes wrong?

A single stablecoin payment can involve one company moving the stablecoin, another converting it and a bank making the final payout. If the money doesn’t arrive, the customer will expect an answer from the provider they chose, not a list of the others involved.

Regulators are already thinking about this. MAS is consulting on requiring all licensed payment institutions, and regulated stablecoin issuers once its new framework is in force, to join its independent financial dispute resolution scheme. Anti-money laundering, sanctions and fraud checks apply to stablecoins as much as to any other international payment, and the Hong Kong–Malaysia agreement also covers anti-scam and anti-fraud work. Card payments have had decades to build up fraud monitoring, chargebacks and customer protections. Stablecoin payments are still catching up, especially when several providers share a single payment.

What this means for banks and payment providers

Most businesses paying an overseas supplier don’t care whether a stablecoin is involved. They want the supplier paid quickly, at a fair price, with someone to call if it goes wrong. So the question for banks and payment providers isn’t whether to choose fiat or stablecoins. It’s whether they can offer both side by side, and explain clearly where a customer’s money goes at each step.

From where we sit at Tribe, the stablecoin leg is rarely the hardest part. The harder part is everything around it: converting into local currency, paying out over local real-time rails such as PayNow, DuitNow and PromptPay, issuing cards that let customers spend a stablecoin balance anywhere cards are accepted, and running the fraud, compliance and dispute processes that regulators expect.

Regulators across the region are taking different paths, so the sensible place to start is with specific payment routes, not a region-wide strategy. Where stablecoins make a payment cheaper or get a supplier paid sooner, they’re worth building on. The providers that benefit most will be the ones that can plug stablecoins into the payment infrastructure their customers already rely on.