The Good Tech Companies - Stables CEO: Asia Drives 60% of Global Stablecoin Flows and Has Zero Licensed Orchestration Platform

Episode Date: April 16, 2026

This story was originally published on HackerNoon at: https://hackernoon.com/stables-ceo-asia-drives-60percent-of-global-stablecoin-flows-and-has-zero-licensed-orchestration-platform. Stables CEO Bernardo Bilotta on building USDT payment rails for Asia, the corridor trap, and why stablecoins need a Stripe moment. Check more stories related to web3 at: https://hackernoon.com/c/web3. You can also check exclusive content about #web3, #cryptocurrency, #blockchain, #stables, #defi, #good-company, #technology, #startup, and more. This story was written by: @ishanpandey. Learn more about this writer by checking @ishanpandey's about page, and for more stories, please visit hackernoon.com.

This audio is presented by Hacker Noon, where anyone can learn anything about any technology. Stable CEO, Asia drives 60% of global stablecoin flows and has zero licensed orchestration platform by Ashon Pondi. Greater than stable coins have moved from crypto-native curiosity to serious financial greater than infrastructure and nowhere is that shift more consequential than Asia, where greater than dollar-denominated settlement sits at the intersection of regulatory greater than complexity, booming Web 3 adoption and chronically underserved developer greater than tooling. Stables is betting it can own that infrastructure layer.

I sat down with Bernardo Bilota, co-founder and CEO of Stables, to understand what they're building, why Asia, and whether the, stripe for stable coins, label actually fits. Ashon Pondi. Hi, Bernardo. Welcome to our Behind the Startup series. Tell U.S. about yourself and what led you to build Stables, Bernardo Bilota. We started Stables in 2021 because the Stablecoin experience for consumers was terrible.

I've spent the previous decade building fintech consumer products, including leading the global rollout of the Zip app to Morethan 10 million users as head of mobile at Zipco. That background gave me Avery clear understanding of what consumer-grade financial products look like and stablecoin wallets and experiences in 2021 were nowhere close. Hundreds of millions of people across Asia and emerging markets were already using USDT as their de facto digital dollar. But the products they were using looked and felt like they'd been built by and for crypto engineers. The wallets were clunky, the flows were confusing, and the entire experience assumed you already understood blockchain. We set out to build the best consumer

stable coin product in the market, something that felt like a proper neobank, not a crypto tool. The problem was that there was nothing to build on. No off-the-shelf infrastructure for stable coin payments existed, certainly not in Asia. compliant on-ramp and off-ramp APIs, no unified compliance stack, no reliable corridors between USDT and local currencies. So to build the consumer experience we wanted, we had to build all of the infrastructure underneath it ourselves, the banking integrations, the KYC and AML pipelines, the transaction monitoring, the liquidity connections, the Fiat settlement rails. Every layer from scratch, my co-founders brought the right pieces to make that possible.

Daniel Lee had built Reedy to over $20 million in arranged buy and understood how to scale commercial operations. David Nichols is a lawyer with 20 years in banking risk and compliance, including co-founding Shinja Bank and leading risk at Commonwealth Bank of Australia. Between the three of us, we had the product instinct, the commercial engine, and the regulatory backbone to actually pull it off. What we didn't anticipate was that the infrastructure we built to power our own product would turn out to be more valuable than the product itself. That realization came later and it changed everything about our trajectory, but the founding impulse was simple.

Stablecoins deserved a consumer experience as good as the best neobanks in the world, and nobody was building it. Ashon Pondi Stables launched in 2021 as a stable coin neobank. What changed internally in the market or in your own thinking that led you to open up your infrastructure to developers as a B2BAPI platform? Bernardo Bilota. We built the consumer wallet first because we needed to There was no off-the-shelf infrastructure for stable coin neobanking in 2021, certainly not in Asia.

So we built everything ourselves. The compliance stack, the banking integrations, the on-ramp and off-ramp corridors, the KYC flows, the transaction monitoring. All of it, from the ground up, what changed was the realization that the hardest part of what we'd built wasn't the wallet interface. It was the infrastructure underneath it, and every other company trying to build on stablecoin rails in the region was hitting the same wall we'd already climbed over, fragmented banking relationships, jurisdiction by jurisdiction compliance, unreliable liquidity, and months of engineering just to get a

single corridor live. The pivot wasn't a pivot in the dramatic sense. It was more like looking at what we'd built and recognizing that the infrastructure was the product. The wallet was a proof of concept, the rails were the business. Once we opened those APisto other developers, volume grew 8x in a matter of months. That told U.S. everything we needed to know. The market timing helped too. By 2025, regulatory clarity was arriving across key jurisdictions, institutional capital was starting to take stable coins seriously, and developer demand for compliant, programmable rails had outpaced what any single provider could offer. We'd already built the thing everyone else was scrambling to piece together. Ashon Pondi, you're specifically focused on building compliant USDT Rails 4th Asian Web3

market. Asia is the largest remittance recipient region in the world, yet you've said the stable coin infrastructure there remains deeply fragmented. What structural problem are you solving that existing players have failed to address? Bernardo Belota, the numbers tell the story pretty clearly. Only about 1% of local banks in Asia are willing to work closely with stable coin businesses. There are roughly 150 currencies in the region that need stable coin connectivity. And as of our last analysis, there were zero licensed orchestration platforms purpose built for USDT in Asia. Zero. That's the structural problem. Asia drives approximately 60% of global stable coin payment flows, yet there's been a massive overinvestment in the use in Latin America when it comes

to stable coin infrastructure. The capital and THE builder attention went west, and the region generating the most actual payment volume got left with duct tape and manual processes. What existing players have failed to address is the full stack problem. You've got on-ramp providers who are consumer-focused and not built for B2B developer infrastructure. You've got regional OTC desks that are manual and not API first. You've got crypto payment processors optimized for different stable coin ecosystems. None of them give a developer a single integration to move USDT in and out of local currencies across the region, with the compliance stack handled.

and the fragmentation compounds. Banks in Asia change their risk appetite with little warning, which means developers are constantly scrambling for alternatives. Every corridor is its own regulatory environment with its own capital controls. The result is that building a stable coin payment product in Asia today feels like assembling a puzzle where the pieces keep changing shape. We built stables to be the table the puzzle sits on. Ashon Pondi. You've described what you call the corridor trap, where every new payment corridor requires a new banking relationship, a new compliance stack, and a new integration timeline. How does Stables' infrastructure break that cycle technically, and how does it handle regulatory compliance without adding friction at the developer

layer? Bernardo Belota. The corridor trap is real, and it's the single biggest reasons table coin businesses in Asia grow slowly. Without us, every new corridor means a new banking partner to negotiate with, a new compliance framework to build, a new integration to engineer and maintain. It's not a software problem. It's a business development and regulatory problem that happens to require software to solve. Our API is built on three pillars. The customer layer handles identity, compliance, and risk. KYC and KYB verification, real-time transaction monitoring and KYT, sanctions screening, and travel rule compliance for cross-border transactions. The ledger layer handles reconciliation and auditability, tracking every debit, credit, and stable coin to Fiat

conversion with a clean audit trail. The transfer layer handles orchestration across both Fiat and Stable Coin rails, including virtual accounts, banking rails, on chain settlement, and deep stable coin to Fiat liquidity. For the developer, all three layers sit behind a single integration. They submit their end users via API. We handle the KYC, the compliance screening, the transaction monitoring. Their users can on-ramp from local currency to USDT or off-Ramp from USDT to local currency in their bank account. New corridors become a configuration change, not an engineering project. On the compliance side, we're multi-jurisdictionally licensed. We hold licenses in Australia, Europe, and Canada today, with licensing in progress in the UAE and Singapore.

Our structure allows us to expand into new jurisdictions by issuing products through existing licensed entities under unified global compliance policies. That means a developer integrating once gets access to our entire licensed corridor network without having to think about regulatory fragmentation. The friction reduction is the product. If a developer has to spend engineering months integrating fragile banking partners, or if frozen funds and failed payouts are eroding their margins, or if compliance delays are damaging Thier and users' experience, then the infrastructure has failed. Our job is to make all of that

invisible. Ashan Pondi, you've processed over a billion dollars in retail transactions and support payments across 19 blockchain networks. Most stable coin conversations focus on picking the right chain. You've argued that's the wrong question entirely. What should enterprises actually be asking when they build a stable coin strategy? Bernardo Belota. The chain question is a distraction. It's like asking which highway your delivery truck should use when the real question is whether the goods arrive on time, at the right cost, in a way the customer trusts. Enterprises get pulled into chain debates because that's where the marketing noise is. But the problems that actually kill stable coin adoption in a business context have nothing to do

with which L1 or L2 you settle on. The questions enterprises should be asking are more fundamental. Can I move U.S.D. Tinto and out of the local currencies my customers use, reliably, at scale, Can Edo it without building a compliance stack in every jurisdiction I operate in? Can I add a new corridor without a six-month integration project? What happens to my funds when a banking partner changes their risk appetite overnight? This is exactly why our integration with USDT-ZO and layer zero matters. USDT-ZEther's Omni-Chane standard, which means USDT can move natively across supported chains without the developer managing bridge infrastructure or multi-chain complexity. For our

developers, USDT just moves. They don't need to think about which chain it lives on, because the orchestration layer handles that. The enterprises that will win in stable coin payments are the ones who stop optimizing for chain selection and start optimizing for corridor coverage, compliance reliability, and settlement speed. Those are the variables that determine whether a payment product works for real users or just looks good in a pitch deck. Ashon Pondi. Stables has partnerships with MasterCard, Circle, Marquetta, and coins. P.H. And is now expanding into the UAE through Hub 71. How do you see this infrastructure contributing to the broader convergence of traditional finance and blockchain-based capital markets,

particularly in markets where only around 1% of local banks are willing to work with stablecoins? Bernardo Belota. The convergence is already happening, and it's happening faster than most people in traditional finance realize. The question isn't whether fiat and stablecoin rails will merge. It's who builds the connective tissue between them. Our partnership ecosystem reflects that conviction. We've built relationships across both traditional payment networks and the stable coin native ecosystem because the infrastructure needs to bridge both worlds. The UAE expansion through Hub 71 is strategic.

The Middle East is moving faster than almost any weather region on regulatory clarity for digital assets and Dubai in particular as becoming a hub for stable coin infrastructure companies. That aligns with where we need to be as we scale our corridor coverage beyond Asia into the broader emerging market ecosystem. As for the 1% banking problem, that's actually a competitive advantage for U.S. rather than a barrier. Because so few banks are willing to work with stable coins, the companies that have already built those banking relationships and wrapped them in a compliant, developer-friendly API have a moat that's extremely hard to replicate.

Every banking relationship we hold is one that took months of trust building to establish. A new entrant can't just spin that up. Ashand Pondi. Given that USDT dominates stable coin volumes in Asia, your platform seems naturally positioned to serve as connective tissue across tether-based services in the region. Is unifying that ecosystem a deliberate strategic goal or an organic outcome of what you're building?

Bernardo Bilota. Deliberate. Completely deliberate. We are USDT native by design, not by default. Every partnership in our stack ISUSDT align. Our integration with USDT 0 and layer 0, our liquidity partnerships with MANSA and T0 network, our institutional Rails partnership We the Stable, which includes local stable coin issuing backed by USDT and Hadron. The entire architecture is built around the stable coin that actually

dominates payment flows in Asia. USDT isn't just the most popular stable coin in the region. It's a $35 trillion payment network. Think of it as a global dollar highway. What Asia has been missing is the on-ramps and off-ramps that connect that highway to local economies in a compliant, programmable way. That's what we're building. We have an active collaboration with Tether that gives us unmatched access to Tether's banking network, liquidity depth, and market credibility. That relationship isn't something we stumbled into. We pursued it because being deeply embedded in the Tether ecosystem is the single most important strategic position you can hold if you're building stablecoin infrastructure in Asia. The way I think about it, in every

Every major technology platform shift, the companies that align early and deeply with the dominant ecosystem capture disproportionate value. USDT is the dominant ecosystem in Asian stable coin payments. We're building the infrastructure layer for that ecosystem. That's not accidental. Ashand Pondi. Stables has been described as the stripe for stable coins in Asia. Is that analogy accurate and what does it get right or wrong about what you're actually

building? Bernardo Belota. The analogy is useful shorthand. and it captures the developer experience we're going for. Stripe made it so any developer could accept payments with a few lines of code, and the entire complexity of payment processing, fraud detection, and compliance disappeared behind a clean API. That's exactly what we're doing for stable coin payments in Asia,

only integration, full compliance stack handled, deep liquidity, new corridors via configuration, where the analogy falls short is in the complexity of what we're actually orchestrating underneath. Stripe built on top of existing card networks and banking infrastructure that, for all its flaws, had been standardized over decades. We're building at the intersection of two financial systems that are still learning to talk to each other, traditional banking and stablecoin rails. We're not just processing payments. We're bridging fiat and stablecoin worlds, managing multi-jurisdictional compliance, maintaining deep liquidity across volatile FX pairs,

and navigating banking relationships in a region where bankscan change their stable. label coin risk appetite overnight. The other thing the Stripe comparison misses is the specific bed we're making. Stripe is payment infrastructure. We're money movement infrastructure. The underlying thesis is that cross-border flows, which are $850 billion globally Tolo and middle-income countries, are migrating from legacy rails to USDT. The serviceable addressable market for USDT-addressable flows is growing at 19% CAG-RAND projected to reach $340 billion by 2030. The companies that own the orchestration layer for that migration will capture disproportionate value asth market scales from millions to billions of users.

So yes, we're the stripe for stable coins in Asia in terms of the developer simplicity we deliver. But the market we're going after and the infrastructure we're building underneath is a fundamentally different animal. We're processing over $1.3 billion in annualized TPV today. We're ebid depositive, and we're growing at 466% year over year. The Stripe analogy is a starting point for understanding what we do. The numbers tell you how big this is becoming. Don't forget to like and share the story.

Thank you for listening to this Hackernoon story, read by artificial intelligence. Visit hackernoon.com to read, write, learn and publish.