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In the latest episode of Blockhead's Licensed to Shill podcast, hosted by Ledger APAC head Takatoshi Shibayama alongside Economics Design CEO Lisa JY Tan, Jeannie Lim, co-founder and head of growth at stablecoin payments startup Xweave, argues that stablecoin adoption is not happening where most of the industry looks for it. Retail use is negligible, she says. The real growth is in institutional treasury settlement and person-to-person remittance among people the banking system has never reached.
Before co-founding Xweave, Lim worked on Meta's Novi team, building what she describes as the first stablecoin wallet, aimed at a remittance corridor between the US and the Philippines she pegs at $11 billion in inefficiency. She later worked at Paxos before starting Xweave, a non-custodial payments orchestration layer that moves fiat to fiat over stablecoin rails.
"If you look at retail mainstream adoption, it's basically less than 1% of the total use case of stablecoins in general," Lim said. "It's mainly banking and treasury settlement."
She illustrated the point with a client: a Singapore-headquartered e-commerce company doing roughly $1 billion in annual volume that repatriates funds from the Philippines. Its bank, a tier-two institution by SWIFT standards, quoted settlement times of three days or longer. Xweave moved the funds in under three minutes at a 30% cost reduction. "He was shocked," Lim said of the client's CFO. "What did you do? Did you actually just fund me? Is this credit, or can I actually cash it?"
Where stablecoins do reach consumers, Lim locates it among the roughly 65% of people in Indonesia and the Philippines without bank accounts, a population that began holding USDT during the pandemic through play-to-earn games such as Axie Infinity. She names Indonesia and Vietnam as the largest markets for that consumer use case today.
Tan pushed back on framing this as a crypto story at all. "The stablecoin conversation is not part of a crypto conversation, it's part of a fintech conversation," she said. "The key infrastructure that's driving the growth is not the adoption of blockchain as an ecosystem, it's the availability of e-wallets." She pointed to Abu Dhabi's recent licensing of GFOX as a round-the-clock digital asset clearing house as an example of the settlement infrastructure stablecoins now sit on top of.
On regulation, Lim contrasted the US, where the GENIUS Act's reserve-backing rules have drawn issuers in, with Europe, where she said MiCA's restrictions pushed Tether out. She was less certain that clearer rules will help emerging-market adoption directly. Southeast Asian regulators such as Singapore's MAS, she argued, have offered more consistency than either region by staying insulated from election-cycle policy swings.
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Blockcast is hosted by Head of APAC at Ledger, Takatoshi Shibayama. Previous episodes of Blockcast can be found here, with guests like Daren Guo (Reap), Yat Siu (Animoca Brands), Kean Gilbert (Lido), Joey Isaacson (Nook), Kapil Dhiman (Quranium) Eric van Miltenburg (Ripple), Davide Menegaldo (Neon EVM), Anastasia Plotnikova (Fideum), Jeremy Tan (Singapore parliament candidate), Hassan Ahmed (Coinbase) and more on our recent shows.
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