Stablecoins have the potential to transform cross-border payments by improving speed, efficiency, and reducing costs.
However, a new whitepaper from Saber, a stablecoin-native infrastructure company, reveals that while these integrations show promises in pilots, they frequently fail when scaling to production volumes in Asia. The primary hurdles include intricate multi-party connections, critical failure modes that only surface under real load, and a fragmented regulatory landscape.
The paper, released in early June, looks at Asia’s diverse cross-border payment corridors, highlighting how stablecoins can theoretically eliminate friction in cross-border payments, while exposing the severe limits and challenges of current implementations.
Complex integration
According to the paper, the core challenge lies in connecting diverse intermediaries, including banks, liquidity providers, off-ramps, and compliance systems that operate inconsistently across markets. Each of these entities has its own tech stack, data structure, compliance rules, and assumptions about how things should work. Even within the same country, requirements can vary depending on the banking channel or flow type.
Furthermore, pilots often hide scale-related issues because early implementations look great when volumes are low, masking the operational messiness that emerges at production levels. As a result, companies may mistakenly believe they have achieved success when they have only proven that a few transactions can work once.
Another challenge outlined in the paper is that error handling requirements are routinely underestimated. This is because teams fail to account for timeouts, partial successes, reconciliation gaps, and partner-specific failure patterns that only appear in production environments.
Finally, the paper notes that for high-volume operators, integration never ends. Every new corridor requires a new set of partners to vet, connect, monitor, and defend against regulatory and operational shocks, a strategy that frequently transforms into a resource-draining loop of perpetual maintenance.
Regulatory fragmentation
Beyond technical hurdles, the paper stresses that the regulatory landscape in Asia presents a unique complexity. The region is home to a fragmented and complex regulatory landscape, comprising 48 distinct regulatory regimes, each with asymmetric compliance rules, localized identity verification mandates, and evolving “travel rule” structures.
Stablecoin regulation is far from uniform and varies by market with each country’s stance reflecting how regulators balance monetary control, consumer protection, and payment innovation. For advanced markets like Singapore, Hong Kong, and the Philippines, regulators clearly define who can issue, custody, on-ramp, off-ramp, and distribute stablecoins, while in more restrictive markets like India and Vietnam, regulators often limit activity to offshore or bank-mediated models.
Additionally, foreign exchange (FX) and capital controls vary wildly. Countries with free or lightly managed capital flows like Singapore allow smoother conversion, while markets with strong capital controls like Vietnam, Indonesia and India tightly govern how and when stablecoins can be converted into local currency.
These regulators are also unpredictable. Shifts can occur rapidly, causing smaller partners to pause operations, block flows, or exit corridors entirely. Local partners with deep relationships tend to handle these transitions better.
Pillars for success
To address these challenges, Saber proposes four pillars for success. First, the paper emphasizes the need for structural cost efficiency. This involves designing for permanent cost reduction rather than premium dependence, since premiums appear in certain corridors or time windows but remain temporary. Premiums represent the difference between global USD pricing and the local fiat value received at conversion. Consequently, unit economics should focus on shorter prefunding cycles, fewer opaque middlemen, and predictable execution.
Second, it advocates for local partnerships by working with deeply embedded entities who can operate through regulatory change, bank behavior shifts, and operational stress. It stresses that Asia lacks a unified payments or compliance framework, implying that execution must always happen inside local licensing and banking boundaries.
Third, it recommends proper corridor liquidity management where liquidity is treated as corridor-specific rather than global. Each corridor possesses its own market depth, timing windows, counterparty availability, and risk profile. Exposure should be monitored continuously and dynamically rebalanced, and hardcoding pricing or routing assumptions should be avoided.
Finally, the infrastructure should be built with a flow orchestration control layer, prioritizing coordinated control rather than just settlement speed. This layer should enable real-time visibility, enforce consistent policy, reroute flows when conditions change, and absorb partner-specific failures so clients see one stable system.
A prominent remittance hub
Asia is a leading global remittance hub. In 2024, remittance flows to low and middle-income countries hit roughly US$680 billion, with Asia capturing the lion’s share. India alone pulled in US$129 billion, or 19% of that amount; China, US$48 billion (7%); the Philippines, US$40 billion (6%); and Pakistan, US$33 billion (5%).
To tap into this opportunity, a thriving ecosystem of stablecoin payment players has emerged over the past few years. It encompasses global and local issuers, infrastructure providers, on/off ramps, liquidity providers, institutional custody firms, and compliance and risk vendors.
Stablecoins have become one of the fastest-growing payment infrastructure in the world. In 2025, these digital currencies processed US$28 trillion in real economic value like payments, remittances and settlement, growing at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 133% since 2023, according to blockchain data platform Chainalysis.
If this baseline growth continues with no additional catalysts, the firm projects volumes could hit US$719 trillion by 2035.
Featured image: Edited by Fintech News Singapore, based on image by thanyakij-12 via Magnific