Stablecoins Are Quietly Changing How the World Sends Money

0:00 This is a story about cutting through the noise. I think Bitcoin is the king of this market. It will remain the king of this market. I'm laser like focused on bitcoin. I think Bitcoin is digital capital. I think it's going to outperform the S&P index over the indefinite future. There was nothing that couldn't be done in crypto. Better faster cheaper more transparently. There's been a lot of noise about cryptocurrencies. It's sometimes hard to sort out the crypto noise from the signal. But whatever the reality behind all the hype, there is one particular version of cryptocurrency that is growing in use that seeks to deliver on the promise of combining the speed and ease of blockchain with the relative stability of currencies, and that you may be using without even knowing it. According to supporters, 2025 was the year of the stablecoin, and five years or ten years the overwhelming majority of the payments that happen in the world just by sheer number of payments, are happening via stablecoins.

0:56 It can be fundamental to changing not just the financial system, but the way the broader economic system works. And as of last year, of the stablecoins subset of crypto now has the regulatory backing of the US. This could be perhaps the greatest revolution in financial technology since the birth of the internet itself. A lot of people are saying that, I don't know. What do you guys think is the answer to President Trump's question may lie in the wallets of people around the world who simply want to send money across national borders.

1:27 According to Bloomberg Intelligence, the total amount of money sent using stablecoins will reach over $56 trillion by 2030. But however big it ultimately gets, it's starting small, with many people sending just a few hundred dollars at a time. People like Hannah Nicole Dunois I have been living in New York for eight years and I am a restaurant manager. I send money home to the Philippines. I would say about like between $500 to $1000 a month. I prefer sending money home through apps like World Remit or remotely. Dunois is one of 2 million Filipinos living abroad. Together, they sent $35 billion back to the Philippines in 2025, equal to over 7% of the country's GDP.

2:14 For Way Joe, the CEO of Philippine based coins, this is stablecoins biggest opportunity. Ten years ago, the cost of remittance for every dollar it was 8%. With technology with better connectivity and banking rules, that cost went down to like 2 to 4%. By using stablecoins, we can lower that cost to anywhere between 0.5% or 50 bits. And we hope to lower that even to like 20 to 30 bits. When you're running $40 billion of remittance for every 1% that you save. You know, that's like $400 million that goes back into the people's pockets right away.

2:48 Coins partners with online money transfer platforms to bring stablecoins to users wallets. It partners with, among others, remotely. Its CEO is Sebastian Cunningham. Every time that you do a send Transaction. We have a transaction engine that chooses the best way to send that money at low cost and at speed. So we use the stablecoins rails. The machine decides. Is the stablecoin rails better, faster, cheaper than any alternative. And therefore we use it. So we're we're adopting it where it's what it makes sense, where it beats price, where it beats speed. This process is called a stablecoin sandwich. A user in the U.S.

3:30 deposits dollars with remit Lee, which converts the funds into stablecoins. These stablecoins travel instantly across a blockchain to coins in the Philippines, where they are converted into local pesos, although users can hold the stablecoins in a digital wallet. For most, the blockchain path is entirely invisible. Customers interact only with the dollars at one end and the pesos at the other end, enjoying the speed of crypto without the complexity of managing it. We have crypto. We are stablecoins.

3:59 There's been a fair amount of volatility in cryptocurrencies. Does that affect stablecoins? For stablecoins it is moving towards sort of, you know just another word for money. Stablecoins are a type of crypto right. But it's sort of like it has grown out of crypto and can be its own segment. Now, what do you regard as your largest opportunity for growth? Basically lowering the transaction costs and then, uh, decreasing the transaction time, uh, for uh, to move money in and out of the Philippines. Uh, I think right now what we see is that there's like almost 15 to 20 million Filipinos that work overseas, either as domestic helpers, work on cruise liners, as factory workers in the Middle East, in Korea and Japan. The financial services they need are actually back home in the Philippines, whereas they get paid in the local dollar. We really believe that by sort of, um, using stablecoins as sort of the the conduit, we can actually be able to deliver financial services that they need at home here in the Philippines.

4:56 Uh, while working overseas last year, some estimates put the volume of stablecoin transactions at around $35 trillion, but a new report from McKinsey's Matt Higginson suggests the reality is much more modest. How large is the stablecoin market right now, and how fast is it growing? So you'll hear in the media the trillions of dollars of stablecoin payments today. 99% of that is crypto related, not the sort of payments we think about, which is comforting to company or even paying remittances person to person. And so we look at this situation today and say how much real payments volume is are out there.

5:36 And we think it's probably the order of 1 billion or 2 a day, which is tiny. The latest estimates we have are $390 billion in the total year. And that compares with several trillion dollars of regular payments per day. So a small amount right now, how does it compare with last year and has it compared with forecast for next year? The data shows that the volume of real payment transactions using stablecoins probably doubled over the last year.

6:06 When you look at the volume of stablecoins in circulation that went from around $150 billion to $300 billion, today it's doubling, which by any measure is substantial in terms of growth. How much of that is cross-border international, essentially. How much of it is domestic? The vast majority is cross-border. It's interesting. We've been looking at the geographic source of those payments with our research partner, Artemus Analytics. What they found is about 60% originates from Asia.

6:36 And that surprises a little bit because a lot of the talk has been in North America or Europe about the potential of stablecoins. Asia was one of the first regions to recognize the utility of stablecoins, and became a frontrunner in regulating the space for over a decade. Some. Nandu Mohanty was the chief fintech officer at the Monetary Authority of Singapore, where he built the country's digital asset strategy. The single biggest unsolved challenge in the world of payment is the cross-border payments world.

7:06 Today, we have to depend on traditional correspondent bank. In that particular use case. A stablecoin is a great product. Singapore generally is recognized as a leader in the use of and regulation of stablecoin. Why? Why Singapore? As a country, we, uh, we look at options, innovation, and we actually relentlessly focus on use case. We don't do technology for the sake of technology. In Singapore's case, our focus on stablecoin has always been well regulated. Stablecoin issued under a strong regulatory framework. Japan and Singapore were among the first to establish a framework requiring companies to maintain liquid reserves, representing 100% of the stablecoins they issued.

7:54 Mohanty says robust regulation must lead the way for stablecoin to scale. The principle of regulation should not change because payment is a payment. Know your customer. Money laundering, terrorism financing checks or I will say hydrogen's there like non negotiable. I personally believe an existing payment regulation with some incremental coverage for a stablecoins unique technical requirement is good enough to be consistent, good enough regulation to manage this risk and payment companies agree. Regulatory clarity allows companies to bring the product to more customers. Scale matters, which means once you have the infrastructure, we can move $100 billion a year in that infrastructure, but we could also move $1 trillion a year without much more.

8:44 Building trust is expensive. Doing compliance is expensive. Getting the license is expensive. Once you put all that in place, it's a highly scalable business. Today, stablecoins are still small players against a colossal banking system, but they are gaining momentum with growth expected to speed up as the genius act in the United States comes into effect. The Genius Act will come into force by the end of the year, and other regulations I expect will follow. So we haven't really gone live yet at scale, so I think we have a little time before that train leaves the station. The sobering part of that is when it does leave the station, we're going to have adoption at scale.

9:24 We've got groups of banks, potentially dozens of banks suddenly all participating together. And I think there will be a bit of a scramble to position myself as a bank between stablecoin and customer to provide the best interface. What does your success potentially mean for traditional banks? There's one bank here in the Philippines that was like top ten, maybe like six or seventh, but because they were the only one or the first one to bank, you know, exchanges like ourselves.

9:53 They're now now a top three bank. Fast is nice. But when it comes to our money, there's also something to be said for slow. So stablecoins are something I would be willing to try. It's just going to be a matter of convenience and then I'm just not too educated about it. I would also consider if it's also going to be convenient with my family, because they're not really tech savvy. So I want to make sure that it's going to be easy for them as well.

10:18 Trusting an app is really important for me because it's my hard earned money. The use of stablecoin for cross-border transfers is more for small and medium sized businesses rather than big businesses. Why don't the big businesses use it for that purpose? Well, I used to joke that if one thing you do not want to be instant and quick, it is large transfers because nobody's looking to instantly transfer $5 million. You want to be as slow as possible, has as friction in between so that you don't make mistakes, but you do not want to apply those principle on a small $200 transfer across the border because you are taking a speed versus the amount, uh, uh, calibrated risk kill.

11:02 I've been in crypto for about eight years, and you know, when I first came in, I was like, oh, like, let's go unbanked. You know, like, you know, let's take it to Wall Street. But I've been in industry for such a long time, I've come to appreciate the role that banks serve, right. Like, sometimes you just feel safer with your money in the bank, right? In a vault. And they've been attacked left, right, front and center by all kinds of, you know, bad actors. But I think for them to grow, uh, you know, I think those that embrace this technology embrace stablecoins, I think is going to grow, uh, leaps and bounds faster to those that do not work with us and grow together. Or you can, you know, continue just to be a bank. Technology might be driving us all toward a future that's faster, cheaper, and more convenient, but it's not necessarily for everyone or for every transaction.

11:50 And for stablecoins to reach their full potential, they may need more regulation with the aim of fitting in to the legacy banking system rather than replacing it.