State of payments in the Asia-Pacific region

Key takeaways 

• APAC has built some of the world’s most advanced domestic payment systems. Fast payment and QR networks make local payments nearly instant and inexpensive. Stablecoins are in the early stages of plugging into those existing rails. 
• Cross-border payments remain the bigger challenge. APAC lacks a common currency or unified payment rail across the region. Efforts to connect national systems are still largely limited to retail transfers and businesses remain heavily reliant on correspondent banking.
• Asia is the largest source of stablecoin payment volume on an annualized basis. Payments sent from the region account for about $245 billion, or 60% of the global total, with activity concentrated in Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan.
• Regulation is advancing faster than local-currency stablecoin adoption. APAC markets are creating frameworks for regulated stablecoins, but more than 99% of the global market remains dollar-denominated. The next year will test whether new local-currency tokens and cross-border connections gain meaningful usage.

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Executive summary

The Asia-Pacific region is one of the world’s largest and most dynamic payments markets. Home to 60% of the world’s population, the region is projected to generate $1.3 trillion in payments revenue by 2030, with more than half coming from corporate payments.

Within the region’s individual markets, payment infrastructure is developed and effective. Real-time account-to-account systems, mobile wallets, and national QR standards have made domestic payments fast, inexpensive, and widely accessible. But those systems were largely built within national borders. Moving money between APAC markets and outside of the region remains slower and more complicated, particularly for businesses.

Stablecoins are beginning to address some of these gaps. Asia is a major source of stablecoin activity, primarily for trading and payments. Stablecoin business payments in Asia are concentrated in financial hubs including Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan. Across APAC, stablecoins are in the early stages of connecting with existing infrastructure rather than competing with it.

Simultaneously, regulation is reshaping the market. Japan and Hong Kong have established stablecoin regimes, Singapore has published draft legislation to implement its framework, and several other APAC markets are developing their own approaches. Many of these efforts are creating paths for local-currency stablecoins, even as the global stablecoin market remains overwhelmingly denominated in US dollars.

This report examines why domestic payments in APAC work so well, where infrastructure still falls short, how stablecoins are being used today, and where regulations stand across the region.

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Domestic payments are fast, cheap, and reliable 

APAC markets have developed some of the most effective domestic payment infrastructure in the world. The region took a different path than the United States and built its cashless layer on account-to-account rails as opposed to card networks. These systems are now fast, low-cost, and deeply embedded in everyday commerce, raising the bar for any new payment method to compete at the domestic checkout. 

Most APAC markets have a domestic fast payment system that allows users to pay individuals and businesses instantly at any time. Banks and digital wallets connect to these common rails, and standardized QR codes allow merchants to accept payments across participating apps. Among the emerging and developing economies that report payment data to the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), fast payments made up 49% of cashless payments in 2024, against about 10% in advanced economies. Across Southeast Asia, penetration of mobile wallets and QR payments surpassed 80% of the population in 2023.

In Malaysia, national payment network PayNet processed 8.44 billion digital payment transactions in 2025. Transactions on DuitNow QR, Malaysia’s standardized national QR code payment system, more than doubled in 2025 to 3 billion. In the Philippines, standardized QR code transactions overtook card transactions for the first time in 2025. 

Two of APAC’s largest economies, China and India, have similarly high levels of digital payment adoption, but they got there in very different ways. China’s path was private-led. Alipay and WeChat Pay built proprietary payment ecosystems that came to dominate everyday commerce, initially maintaining direct connections with banks. The People’s Bank of China in 2017 said non-bank payments would be required to clear through NetsUnion, a centralized clearing platform that sits between payment companies and banks. India ran the sequence in reverse. UPI launched in 2016 as interoperable national payment infrastructure, operated by the National Payments Corporation of India. The shared system provided the rails, while private apps competed for users on top of them. 

The national fast systems are intentionally inexpensive, particularly for smaller transactions. Account-to-account payments typically carry no credit risk and low interchange, keeping operating costs lower than card networks. Many markets also place caps on fees. India eliminated merchant fees on UPI in 2020 and updated the policy in September 2026. From October 15, 2026, a 0.4% fee will apply to certain UPI merchant payments above ₹2,000, while person-to-person transfers remain free.

Alongside the national fast systems, cards remain important, particularly in the region’s developed markets. APAC card payment value reached an estimated $23.7 trillion in 2024, and in Japan credit cards accounted for 82.7% of cashless spending by value in 2025. More than 29 million credit cards were in circulation in Hong Kong at the end of the first quarter of 2026, a 33.4% increase year-over-year. 

Given that much of the region has instant, inexpensive, and widely accepted domestic payment rails, stablecoins—on the surface, at least—don’t have an immediate path to adoption. Consumers and merchants are unlikely to adopt a new technology that would offer little additional benefit, but stablecoins do have an entry point through existing rails. 

Cards are the clearest example. Stablecoin card programs connect stablecoin balances to existing card networks, allowing consumers to spend them wherever those networks are accepted without requiring merchants to adopt new infrastructure. Stablecoin-linked card spending reached $4.5 billion globally in 2025, up 673% from 2024, according to McKinsey. In the 12 months to August 2026, Rain cardholders spent around $500 million on stablecoin cards at APAC merchants. 

There have also been early efforts to expand existing domestic rails to support stablecoins. HSBC plans to make its upcoming Hong Kong dollar stablecoin available for payments through its mobile wallet, PayMe. Thailand’s finance ministry also announced an 18-month sandbox in 2025 that allows visitors to convert crypto to baht and pay merchants through the country’s existing QR payment system. Both suggest stablecoins could reach domestic commerce through payment methods consumers and merchants already use rather than entering as a competing rail.

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Cross-border payments show the friction 

While many APAC markets have effectively solved domestic payments with national fast payment systems, these rails today are largely ineffective when it comes to cross-border payments. Each system was built for one country and its local currency. International payments still mostly require going through the correspondent banking system, converting currencies, and, in several markets, adhering to capital controls. 

This structural disadvantage sets APAC apart from the other large payments markets. The eurozone removed most intra-regional currency exchange friction with the euro, and the US has the benefit of issuing the currency used in 89% of foreign exchange transactions. APAC has a robust remittance market, but neither advantage. 

Four of the world’s five largest remittance recipient countries are in Asia, according to the World Bank’s December 2024 estimates: India, China, the Philippines, and Pakistan. The Philippines received a record $39.62 billion in personal remittances in 2025, and Pakistan received $41.6 billion in the fiscal year to June 2026. 

Moving that money remains expensive and slow, though the burden varies significantly by channel. In the third quarter of 2025, sending $200 to East Asia and the Pacific cost an average of 5.83%. But that regional average masks a wide gap in how people send money. Globally, digital remittances cost an average of 4.59%, compared with 7.30% for cash and other non-digital channels and 14.99% for bank transfers. Someone sending money through a digital app may therefore pay considerably less than the headline figure suggests, while someone relying on a bank can pay more than twice the regional average. In October 2025, the Financial Stability Board found that just 0.5% of business-to-business payments sent from East Asia and the Pacific were credited within an hour, compared with 28% of person-to-person payments.

To reduce some of that friction, central banks across Asia have begun connecting their domestic payment systems. Singapore's PayNow links to India's UPI, Thailand's PromptPay, and Malaysia's DuitNow. Indonesia's QRIS works in Malaysia, Thailand, Singapore, and Japan. Project Nexus, incubated at the BIS and targeted to launch in 2027, plans to go further and connect national systems from its five founding markets: India, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, and Thailand. Indonesia also joined Project Nexus in 2026. 

Where these linked networks fall short is that they’re currently regional. The US, the top remittance sender in the world, has no comparable universal real-time retail system. The European Central Bank in 2025 said it would “start the realization phase” of connecting TIPS, its instant payment system, to India’s UPI. The pilot is scheduled to go live in the first half of 2027. 

APAC’s connected systems are also limited in the type and size of transaction they can support. Every PayNow link—to India, Thailand, and Malaysia—caps transfers at SGD 1,000 per user per day and allows only person-to-person payments. The QR links work the other way, for merchant payments only, with no way to send money to individuals. Across all 29 QR and person-to-person linkages ASEAN counted at the end of 2025, the payment volume for the year was about $1 billion, a small fraction of the total value transferred outside of these systems. 

Project Nexus is also being built for retail payments, and the BIS says the transaction caps mean the program “could not practically be used to send high-value ‘wholesale’ payments between financial institutions.” 

Central banks in APAC have also experimented with settling cross-border transactions with wholesale central bank digital currencies (CBDCs), mostly for trade. mBridge is one of the most advanced multi-CBDC platforms in use today. Developed jointly by the BIS Innovation Hub and the central banks of Hong Kong, Thailand, China, and the United Arab Emirates, mBridge facilitated over $22 million in payment and foreign exchange transactions during a six-week pilot in 2022. The BIS left mBridge in 2024, saying that while the project no longer needed the BIS’s support, it was “not mature enough to start operating.” mBridge is still running, although with different participants. Saudi Arabia later withdrew and Macao and Mongolia joined in 2026. 

Globally, stablecoins are emerging as an alternative to traditional remittance rails, offering a faster and cheaper way to send money internationally. Cross-border stablecoin transfers rose 77.5% in the year to June 2026, reaching $220.3 billion. Chainalysis found cross-border stablecoin activity exceeded domestic activity in every Central and Southeast Asian and Oceanian market it analyzed, 3.2 to 1 across the region. The average cross-border payment was about $3,000, a size Chainalysis calls "far too small to be institutional," suggesting the activity is driven by retail users and small businesses as opposed to institutions. PDAX CEO Nichel Gaba estimates that 5% to 10% of remittances sent to the Philippines are being settled in stablecoins. 

Solana is seeing a similar pattern on its network. Remittances in emerging markets, including the Philippines and across South and Southeast Asia, are “the one consumer use case that has genuinely crossed beyond crypto-native users,” said Anna Zhang, Head of Payment Growth, APAC at the Solana Foundation. Remittances and B2B settlement are also the network’s fastest-growing payment segments, particularly for corridors ending in India and the Philippines, Zhang said.

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Where stablecoin volume is today 

Stablecoin activity in APAC falls into two main categories: trading and payments. Globally, crypto trading is the biggest driver of stablecoin transaction volume, accounting for about 88% according to a May 2025 Boston Consulting Group report. 

In APAC, trading is most prevalent in South Korea. Korean exchanges Bithumb and Coinone began listing Tether's USDT against the won in December 2023, and by mid-2025 the won was the second most traded currency against USDT after the US dollar, at about $124 million a day on centralized exchanges, roughly level with the euro. Korea's crypto economy grew 12.3% to $449 billion in the year to June 2026, driven by retail trading, according to Chainalysis. Thailand ranks second in the region for stablecoin purchases with local currency. Baht purchases of stablecoins reached about $9.4 billion in the year to June 2025. 

Payments are a smaller share of stablecoin activity, but APAC leads the world in them. McKinsey estimates global stablecoin payments more than doubled in 2025, accounting for $390 billion in annualized volume. About $245 billion of that, or 60%, was sent from Asia, against $95 billion from North America, $50 billion from Europe, and less than $1 billion each from Latin America and Africa.

Despite a ban on crypto trading and related services in place since 2021, China has a crypto economy Chainalysis sizes at $176.3 billion. The number of unique wallets sending stablecoin peer-to-peer transactions grew 43 times between early 2024 and mid-2026, and monthly domestic stablecoin payments grew from about $240 million in March 2025 to nearly $5 billion a year later. 

Within stablecoin payments globally, B2B transfers are the largest, estimated to be about $226 billion annualized from December 2025 activity. A May 2025 study from Artemis, Castle Island Ventures, and Dragonfly found the Singapore to China corridor to be the most active among the payment firms it surveyed, with Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan in the top five sending countries globally. Singapore's institutional-platform activity rose 94% to $60 billion in the year to June 2026.

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Stablecoins are gaining regulatory clarity

Stablecoin regulation is taking shape across APAC, following a familiar model. Like the US under the GENIUS Act and the EU under MiCA, stablecoins are coming inside the regulatory perimeter through licensing, reserve requirements, and redemption rules. In Hong Kong and Japan, similar to the EU, some of the first licensed issuers have leaned toward local-currency tokens, even as stablecoin demand remains overwhelmingly dollar-denominated.

Japan, Hong Kong, and Singapore have some of the most robust stablecoin policy frameworks in the region. Japan permits banks, funds transfer service providers, and certain trust institutions to issue stablecoins under its Payment Services Act, while Hong Kong’s Stablecoins Ordinance took effect in August 2025 and produced its first two licensed issuers in April 2026. Singapore finalized its framework in 2023 and is now implementing it through legislation. 

Despite more than 99% of stablecoins in circulation globally being US dollar-backed, local-currency stablecoins are emerging across APAC. Japan's first registered yen stablecoin, JPYC, launched in October 2025. KRW1, issued by BDACS and backed by Korean won reserves held at Woori Bank, is the first Korean won stablecoin. In September 2026, Rain added support for KRW1, making it spendable at more than 175 million Visa merchant locations around the world. Thailand's central bank says its design study for a baht stablecoin is in its final stage, with regulations expected within 2026 or early 2027. Hong Kong's first two licensed issuers are both focused on Hong Kong dollar tokens. Anchorpoint began a phased rollout of HKDAP in August 2026, while HSBC plans to launch its Hong Kong dollar stablecoin later this year.

APAC’s local-currency stablecoins in circulation have seen limited adoption. As of September 2026, stablecoins backed by the Australian dollar, Singapore dollar, and rupiah collectively had about $30 million in circulation, and JPYC had issued a cumulative ¥10 billion, or about $67 million. 

Euro-backed stablecoins also make up a small portion of the total market, although they’ve had a head start—the first of these tokens were issued years before the first local-currency APAC stablecoins hit the market. Euro-backed stablecoins have a total circulating supply of around $800 million, compared with more than $290 billion for US dollar-pegged stablecoins.

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What to watch 

Whether or not stablecoin adoption accelerates will largely depend on whether stablecoins can connect to the existing payment infrastructure in APAC. This is particularly true when it comes to domestic payments, given how effective the rails are today. There are some early examples of stablecoins entering through established systems, one of which is stablecoin cards. 

When it comes to cross-border payments, stablecoins have a clearer use case. Efforts to link domestic payment systems across APAC have so far been focused on retail payments, while institutions are still reliant on traditional correspondent banking rails. 

Regulation could expand the ways stablecoins enter both domestic and cross-border payment flows. Japan and Hong Kong have established stablecoin regimes, Singapore is implementing its framework, and new local-currency tokens are reaching the market. But regulatory clarity has yet to translate into meaningful adoption of those tokens, leaving an open question around what demand develops as more regulated products become available.