When a tourist from Bangkok uses their Thai e-wallet to pay in Singapore, few stop to think about what powers that transaction.
But for Singapore-based StraitsX, the company behind the stablecoin infrastructure running in the background, that seamless experience is exactly the goal.
Between the fourth quarter of 2024 and the same period in 2025, StraitsX saw its card transaction volume increase 40-fold, company co-founder and CEO Tianwei Liu told CoinDesk.
The number of cards issued grew even faster, increasing 83-fold. This data indicates one of the fastest growing stable card programs in Southeast Asia.
These multiples, while striking, come with context. One of StratisX’s major crypto card partnerships, with RedotPay, only soft-launched in late 2024, suggesting that the fourth quarter of this year represents relatively low benchmark volumes.
Across the crypto cards industry, Artemis Analytics estimates that global monthly volumes have grown from around $100 million at the start of 2023 to over $1.5 billion at the end of 2025, a compound annual growth rate of 106%, suggesting that StraitsX is riding a rising tide rather than simply outperforming a static market.
Data from Dune Analytics shows that total spending on crypto cards tracked on-chain increased by 420% in 2025, from approximately $23 million in January to $120 million in December, with Visa capturing over 90% of on-chain card volume. Visa’s stablecoin card spending alone reached an annualized rate of $3.5 billion in Q4 2025, a 460% year-over-year increase.
Notably, RedotPay, one of StraitsX’s BIN sponsorship partners, processed more than $2.95 billion in card volume in 2025, more than four times the combined volume of its 13 closest competitors, according to available data. This positions StraitsX’s infrastructure at the center of the dominant player in the category.
The question is whether these early-stage growth rates will sustain as the card base matures and the novelty of stablecoin-backed spending gives way to competition on features, rewards, and costs.
The company’s core offering is in the background. Rather than creating a consumer-facing app, StraitsX provides the infrastructure that others can build on. It acts as a Visa BIN sponsor, allowing partners like RedotPay and UPay to issue cards.
When customers tap or scan to pay with these, the stablecoins settle the transaction in real time, with the local currency arriving instantly on the other side.
“No user cares whether a payment is made with stablecoins or fiat; they only care whether the payment is made,” Liu said.
This attitude defines the company’s strategy: making the stablecoin layer invisible. StraitsX processes nearly $30 billion in cumulative stablecoin transactions, but its ambition goes beyond raw volume. Liu wants stablecoins to act like fiber optic cables: present everywhere but unnoticed.
By the end of March, StraitsX plans to launch its two stablecoins, XSGD and XUSD, on the Solana blockchain. This deployment, in partnership with the Solana Foundation, marks the first time that both tokens will live natively on a high-throughput blockchain.
The tokens will support the x402 standard, which allows machine-to-machine micropayments.
“When fees drop near zero, you can suddenly move very small amounts of money, very frequently,” Liu said. “Payments are starting to look more like Internet data streams, continuous, inexpensive, and integrated directly into applications.”
XSGD is already the leader in the non-USD stablecoin market in Southeast Asia, with a share of over 70%. It maintains a 1:1 peg to the Singapore dollar, supported by monthly audits. This peg became even more relevant earlier this year, when the Singapore dollar hit an 11-year high against the US dollar.
Beyond Singapore
Now StraitsX is looking beyond Singapore. A cross-border corridor with Thailand is expected to be commissioned under Project BLOOM, a regulatory initiative by Singapore’s central bank.
The system will allow Thai travelers to scan QR codes in Singapore using KBank’s Q Wallet and pay merchants in their local currency. The transaction will be converted in the background between Thailand’s Q-money and StraitsX’s XSGD, another stablecoin-powered payment hiding in plain sight.
Liu said the model follows a familiar playbook. The GrabPay and Alipay+ integrations, for example, required no user retraining. Nonetheless, the company saw a 400% increase in merchant transaction volume and a sixfold increase in the number of unique users transacting with those merchants month over month.
Similar deployments are planned in Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Like driving an electric car
Visa, one of StraitsX’s main partners, sees this change as a natural evolution of payments. Adeline Kim, country manager of Visa in Singapore and Brunei, told CoinDesk that stablecoin-backed cards do not change the customer experience.
The cards work the same as traditional cards, with chargeback protections and escrow settlements.
“It’s like driving an electric car versus a fuel-powered car on the same highway,” Kim said. “The vehicle is different, but the road signs, tolls and rules don’t change.”
The growth fits a pattern seen across the industry. Full crypto card issuers like Rain and Reap, which are direct members of Visa and manage their own settlement, have seen rapid growth. Rain at over $3 billion annualized and harvest at over $6 billion.
Remittances are a key use case. The World Bank estimates that sending $200 internationally still costs an average of 6.49%. With stablecoins, these fees drop significantly.
Looking ahead, Kim sees stablecoin cards evolving beyond utility. It expects future offerings to include real-time spending insights, cross-border benefits and reward systems tailored to user behavior.
For Liu, success means disappearing. The best stablecoin infrastructure, he said, is the one people don’t see. The transaction works.
