When a tourist from Bangkok taps to pay at a Singapore merchant, there's a decent chance stablecoins are settling the transaction in real time. They just don't know it.

Singapore-based StraitsX is the infrastructure behind several of Southeast Asia's fastest-growing crypto card programs. Between Q4 2024 and Q4 2025, its card transaction volume surged 40x. Cards issued grew 83x. Its cumulative stablecoin processing has passed $30 billion.

The company doesn't build consumer apps. It acts as a Visa BIN sponsor — enabling partners like RedotPay and UPay to issue cards that convert stablecoins to local currency at the point of sale. RedotPay alone processed over $2.95 billion in card volume in 2025, more than four times its 13 closest competitors combined.

The Invisible Layer Strategy

CEO Tianwei Liu's thesis is simple: users don't care what's under the hood, they care that the payment works. StraitsX bets on making stablecoins as invisible as fiber-optic cables.

By end of March, the company plans to launch its XSGD and XUSD stablecoins natively on Solana, where they'll support the x402 machine-to-machine micropayment standard. That's a bet on AI agents and automated systems eventually needing continuous, low-cost payment flows.

XSGD already holds more than 70% share of the non-USD stablecoin market in Southeast Asia, backed by a 1:1 Singapore dollar peg with monthly audits.

A cross-border corridor with Thailand — under Singapore's central bank's Project BLOOM — will let Thai travelers pay Singapore merchants through KBank's Q Wallet with no manual conversion. The stablecoin layer handles it silently.

Broader context: the global crypto card market hit $1.5 billion in monthly volume by late 2025, a 106% CAGR since early 2023, with Visa capturing over 90% of tracked on-chain card volume.