When a tourist from Bangkok taps their phone to pay for lunch in Singapore, most people don’t think about what’s powering that contactless tap. For StraitsX, the Singapore-based company quietly running stablecoin rails behind the scenes, that anonymity is the goal.
StraitsX’s card business exploded between Q4 2024 and Q4 2025: card transaction volume jumped 40x and the number of cards issued rose 83-fold, CEO and co-founder Tianwei Liu told CoinDesk. Those headline multiples are sharpened by context — a major partner, RedotPay, only soft-launched late in 2024, so the year-ago baseline was unusually low — but the growth still signals one of the region’s fastest-scaling stablecoin-card programs.
The boom isn’t isolated. Artemis Analytics estimates global crypto card volumes climbed from roughly $100 million monthly in early 2023 to more than $1.5 billion by late 2025, an implied 106% compound annual growth rate. On-chain tracking from Dune Analytics shows total crypto card spending rising 420% during 2025 — from about $23 million in January to $120 million in December — with Visa accounting for over 90% of on-chain card volume. Visa’s stablecoin-linked card spend alone hit a $3.5 billion annualized run rate by Q4 2025, a 460% year-over-year increase.
RedotPay, one of StraitsX’s BIN-sponsorship partners, handled more than $2.95 billion in card volume in 2025 — reportedly over four times the combined volume of its 13 nearest rivals. That places StraitsX’s infrastructure at the heart of a dominant market player, even as questions remain about whether such rapid early-stage growth will persist once novelty fades and competition shifts to rewards, pricing and product features.
StraitsX deliberately stays out of the consumer spotlight. Instead of building its own wallet, the company provides plumbing for partners: Visa BIN sponsorship, settlement rails and stablecoin conversions that let issuers such as RedotPay and UPay deliver cards to end users. When a consumer taps a card, stablecoins can settle the payment in real time while merchants receive local fiat instantly. “No user cares about whether a payment runs on stablecoins or fiat; they only care if the payment goes through,” Liu said. That principle — make the stablecoin layer invisible — defines StraitsX’s strategy.
To date the firm says it has processed nearly $30 billion in cumulative stablecoin transactions. Now it’s pushing the tech further: by the end of March StraitsX plans to launch its two tokens, XSGD and XUSD, natively on Solana in partnership with the Solana Foundation. The tokens will support the x402 standard, designed for machine-to-machine micropayments. Liu argues that when fees fall “close to zero,” payments can behave like internet data — frequent, tiny transfers embedded directly into apps.
XSGD already dominates non-USD stablecoins in Southeast Asia, holding more than 70% market share, and is maintained at a 1:1 peg to the Singapore dollar with monthly audits. That peg gained extra attention earlier this year when the Singapore dollar reached an 11-year high against the U.S. dollar.
StraitsX is also expanding the geographic reach of its invisible payments. Under Project BLOOM, a Singapore central bank-backed regulatory initiative, the company is launching a cross-border corridor with Thailand. The setup will let Thai travelers scan QR codes in Singapore with KBank’s Q Wallet and pay in baht while the settlement converts between Thailand’s Q-money and XSGD behind the scenes. StraitsX reports a 400% increase in merchant transaction volume and a sixfold rise in unique monthly users transacting with integrated partners like GrabPay and Alipay+ after similar integrations. Japan, Taiwan and Hong Kong rollouts are planned next.
Industry partners see stablecoin cards as an evolutionary, not disruptive, change for users. Adeline Kim, Visa’s country manager for Singapore and Brunei, told CoinDesk that the consumer experience is unchanged — cards still offer chargeback protections and fiat settlement. “It’s like driving an electric car versus a car that runs on fuel on the same highway,” she said. “The vehicle is different, but the road signs, toll booths, and rules don’t change.”
The card market’s growth is mirrored by full-stack issuers too: companies like Rain and Reap have scaled Visa-linked operations to multi-billion-dollar annualized figures (Rain reportedly surpassed $3 billion, Reap over $6 billion). One clear use case is remittances — the World Bank estimates sending $200 internationally still costs an average of 6.49% — and stablecoins can materially cut those fees.
For StraitsX’s Liu, the measure of success isn’t headline volume but disappearance: the best infrastructure is the kind users never notice. If he gets his way, stablecoins will be everywhere yet invisible — the background plumbing that simply makes payments work.
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