Stablecoin payments gaining traction in Asia, reveals Stripe

According to Sarita Singh, Regional Head & Managing Director, Southeast Asia, India, Greater China at Stripe, Asia is strongly positioned to lead the way in weaving stablecoins into the fabric of internet commerce due to high adoption rates and positive regulatory momentum.

Stablecoin payments are gaining traction in Asia with Stripe’s research revealing that almost 46% of businesses surveyed are planning to use it within the next 24 months. Stablecoins offer a global, programmable platform for borderless financial services, where a single integration can unlock customers in dozens of countries at once.

Following the acquisitions of Bridge and Privy, Stripe is now already processing stablecoin payments from over 120 countries. The payments platform unveiled the Stablecoin Financial Accounts earlier this year. Accessible to over 100 countries includes Sri Lanka, Vietnam and Brunei, the account enables entrepreneurs and businesses from those countries to hold a balance in stablecoins, receive funds on both crypto and fiat rails, and send stablecoins anywhere in the world.

Through Bridge, Stripe has also partnered with Visa to launch a Visa card that spends down a stablecoin balance for cardholders in dozens of countries.

“56% of organizations in the region are already using Stablecoins for payments. And its because of the capabilities around programmability, cost effectiveness and speed. Regulators across the whole region are leading the charge as well. Singapore in 2023, launched the Stablecoins bill, but the rest of the region is doing the fast follow. And we know that India and China are continuing on their path of CBDCs. So there is a lot going on in this region and we're very excited to be powering ambitious Asian businesses,” said Singh at a media briefing during the Stripe Tour Singapore 2025.

Singh also mentioned that the adoption of stablecoins is spread across all types of businesses of all shapes and sizes. This includes the most nascent startups all the way to the largest enterprises in the region and even foreign enterprises that have a local presence.

Meanwhile, Mai Leduc, Head of Product at Bridge pointed out that for the Stripe users who are using Stablecoins, their average order transaction value is three times that of normal VF transactions.

“We're seeing not only adoption of growth from these businesses, but the transaction size is showing huge uptick through Stablecoins. It's really about borderless financial services. At Bridge and Stripe, we believe in making sure every business succeeds everywhere. That means a marketplace in Malaysia or a SaaS platform in Indonesia or an export in Vietnam should be able to have the same financial services and infrastructures that a company in New York and London have. And I think Stablecoins brings that to life. Some of the use cases that we're seeing globally in market include cross-border payments, especially for remittances and payroll, we've seen huge adoption there,” said Leduc.

As Bridge powers repatriation of funds, Leduc says its mostly like the corporate treasury management.

“We see that pretty prevalent in a lot of companies that have subsidiaries globally and oftentimes their biggest concern is how do they get funds back into a certain region? For example, SpaceX and Starlink are deploying services in regions like Malawi and others where the currency volatility is pretty significant. So how they leverage Bridge and Stripe is the ability to take those funds and repatriate them immediately into the US. And so we're seeing a huge demand, especially in the last six months where these corporate treasury conversations really take off,” she explained.

At the same time, Leduc also mentioned that they’ve seen a real evolution of pure orchestration for cross-border payments. Payroll has also become a substantial way to leverage stable coins.

“Similar to like WePowerScale.ai where they're paying out data labellers all around the world. As those transactions are usually microtransactions, it would be very cost prohibitive to send those cross-borders using traditional rails. Hence, they leverage Bridge in a way to be able to do that conversion into stablecoins and send those microtransactions very significantly. This is where agentic commerce becomes more prevalent, and the stablecoin infrastructure is going to be very complimentary in driving better, cheaper, faster ways to deliver funds to those, whether that's for payroll, for remittances and such,” added Leduc.

When asked if stablecoins would be rivalling SWIFT, especially with its usage gaining traction among larger global enterprises, Leduc said that Stripe is focused on bridging traditional fintech with crypto. While the fundamental aspects of SWIFT is it is still slow because of course of bond and banking, there's trust and compliance built into that.

“On the crypto side, there's now speed and flexibility. And we're still so incredibly early. And so much of our philosophy right now is about embedding into the existing infrastructure in a way that makes cross-border commerce more efficient and more effective in certain regions where it's very difficult to get funds into the hands of those in a much more cost-effective way. We leverage SWIFT. When you think about on-ramping on off-ramping, we often call it a stablecoin sandwich, where at the end of the day, when you're still getting funds into those regions, stablecoins isn't ubiquitous yet where it's in your wallet where you can spend. So, we always have to think about how that embeds in the payment ecosystem today to make that a reality,” explained Leduc.

Leduc also highlighted that the demand for stablecoins is very clear as the statistics show that the demand for stablecoins with Bridge within the first two years is growing at a much faster rate, with much of traffic driven inbound.Among the customers that are accepting crypto payments, they include Shopify and SpaceX.

“It's still very early and nascent and it's just been incredible to just come into markets, really about the region, the problems and pain points that each region faces and leveraging our primitives to figure out how to solve real-world problems. It's been exciting to see what's being unlocked here in APAC region,” added Singh.