Reap co-founder Daren Guo has a blunt way of sizing up the global payments map. In a 2026 appearance on Solana’s Bits to Bricks series, Guo argued that Asia — not the United States — is where the plumbing for moving dollar-pegged stablecoins is maturing first, because the region was already built to send money across borders Solana interview. His case rests on infrastructure that predates crypto, regulation that is now landing, and transaction data showing a multi-trillion-dollar regional flow. This guide walks through each pillar of that argument and what it means for businesses and consumers who move money internationally.
The starting point: Asia already ran on many currencies
Guo’s first claim is that Asia’s advantage is structural, not a recent crypto trick. In the US, “multi-currency” usually means dollars, pounds, and euros, while in much of Asia the default is to operate across more than a dozen currencies, with bank accounts routinely holding Canadian dollars, Korean won, and Japanese yen, according to Guo’s interview Solana interview. That everyday familiarity with foreign exchange, remittances, and cross-border settlement means businesses and consumers there already manage the complexity that stablecoins automate. Stablecoins, in Guo’s framing, layer speed and programmability on top of money-movement systems designed for international flows from the start.
This matters because the hardest part of cross-border payments is rarely the technology — it is the accumulated habit of operating across jurisdictions. A region that already treats fourteen currencies as ordinary has less cultural and operational friction to adopt a token that settles in seconds.
Regulation is moving in the same direction
The second pillar is policy. Hong Kong’s Stablecoins Ordinance came into force on August 1, 2025, establishing a licensing regime for regulated stablecoin activities under Cap. 656 and giving the Hong Kong Monetary Authority a framework to supervise issuers, per the government’s commencement notice Hong Kong Government Gazette notice. The government described the move as a milestone for the sustainable development of the stablecoin and digital asset ecosystem, and the first HKMA licenses are due in early 2026. For a company like Reap, that is a concrete signal that the jurisdiction wants compliant issuers rather than a gray market.
Singapore moved earlier. The Monetary Authority of Singapore finalized its “MAS-regulated stablecoin” framework in 2023, according to the regulator’s published framework MAS framework, a detail Guo also makes in the interview Solana interview. Together, the two hubs give Asia a regulatory on-ramp that, at the time of the interview, had no direct US federal equivalent of the same clarity for issuers.
The numbers behind the claim
The argument is not only qualitative. Reap’s B2B Stablecoin Payment report, discussed in the interview, quantifies the move: monthly business-to-business stablecoin settlement went from below $100 million in early 2023 to above $3 billion by 2025 — about 30 times larger in two years, according to Reap’s report via the interview Solana interview. By Reap’s count, Asia led all regions in stablecoin volume during 2025 at $12.5 trillion, and the Singapore–China lane was the single busiest corridor. Those figures reframe the conversation from “crypto niche” to “core trade finance.”
Reap itself is a case study in scale. Guo put the company’s annual stablecoin card volume at about $6 billion, and said Reap moved most treasury management onto Solana in 2025 as payment volume climbed, per the interview Solana interview. The move was pragmatic: a firm clearing tens of millions daily needs infrastructure that stays quick and cheap as it scales, and Solana became the primary treasury rail while Reap still keeps USDC and USDT balances on Ethereum, Polygon, and Tron.
Why the dollar still wins — and why that helps Asia
Guo is careful not to predict the dollar’s downfall. According to Guo’s interview, the US dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, it sits at the center of roughly half of world trade, and close to 83% of remittances touch the US at one end or the other Solana interview. His narrower point is about rails, not reserve status: the dollar wins on demand, while Asia is where the infrastructure for moving dollar stablecoins is maturing first. That distinction is the heart of the thesis — Asia is not replacing the dollar, it is building the faster pipes for it.
How Reap got here
Guo’s background shapes the thesis. Before Reap, he joined Stripe near its start and ran its first growth hires, relocating to Asia in 2015 to lead expansion into Hong Kong, Singapore, and China, then co-founding Reap in Hong Kong in 2018 as a corporate card and expense company, according to the interview Solana interview. The early model was hard: Guo said banks would not move, and attempts to improve speed and cost stalled with partners that were not ready. Stablecoins eventually changed that, but only over the last twelve to eighteen months did they move into the mainstream. In the years before adoption took hold, Reap worked to bring card networks, banks, and customers up to speed, a period when most stablecoin demand was still people buying Bitcoin.
The earliest real pull came from multinational companies shifting treasury between countries, and then from digital banks eager to issue cards in underserved markets, per the interview Solana interview. That ordering matters: the initial demand was institutional settlement, not retail speculation, which is consistent with Guo’s emphasis on infrastructure over hype.
The card layer most users never see
For an end user, a Reap card transaction looks like an ordinary fiat swipe, but underneath the balances and settlement can run on stablecoins, with tokens posted as collateral and spent against a credit line so the cards stay postpaid rather than prepaid, according to the interview Solana interview. Reap reaches globally — Europe, Australia, Asia, and the US — by riding the acceptance rails Visa and Mastercard built over decades, while stablecoins add programmable settlement beneath the familiar card experience. The long-term goal Guo describes is stablecoins running through the card settlement system continuously, with programmability layered into settlement between issuers, networks, and acquirers.
The longer vision: banking without borders
Guo’s end state is what he calls banking without borders. A Mexican neobank today serves only Mexico, and a US player like Chime serves only the US, but Guo expects those boundaries to blur over the next five years, letting a platform serve a global market from day one, according to the interview Solana interview. “That’s been the biggest unlock of stablecoins,” he said. The mechanism is programmability: stablecoins clearing through Visa, Visa through acquirers like Stripe, and those acquirers through merchants, all day, every day, with logic baked into the transfers.
That vision is the connective tissue of the whole argument. Infrastructure, regulation, and trade flows each remove a friction point; together they suggest a region where cross-border money moves more like a domestic payment.
What this means for readers
For businesses shipping across borders, the practical takeaway is that Asian-linked trade finance now has a faster, programmable settlement option that did not exist at scale three years ago. For consumers in emerging markets, Guo points to a sharper pain point: Reap sometimes provides cards through partners to individuals “for the very first time ever,” extending basic financial access where it is scarce, according to the interview Solana interview. And for the crypto-curious, the lesson is that the stablecoin story is increasingly about boring payments infrastructure and regulation, not speculation.
Reading the claim with a risk-aware lens
For a risk-aware reader, three caveats apply. First, the headline figures are Reap’s own report and a founder interview, not independently audited market data, so treat the $12.5 trillion regional flow as a vendor estimate, as reported in Reap’s B2B Stablecoin Payment report via the Solana interview Solana interview. Second, the regulatory edge is real but narrow: Hong Kong’s regime is new and licenses are still forthcoming, and the US is developing federal stablecoin legislation that could close the gap. Third, stablecoins carry issuer, redemption, and smart-contract risks that a faster rail does not remove. The “Asia leads” framing is best read as a comment on current settlement plumbing and policy clarity, not a permanent structural verdict.
Where the ecosystem fits
Solana’s role here is more than a podcast host. The network’s validator client updates and slot-time improvements are part of why payment-focused builders treat it as a serious settlement layer, a point reinforced by recent Solana infrastructure work Solana shortens slot times. For a wider view of who is building on the chain this year, the July 2026 ecosystem roundup tracks the payments and infrastructure projects gaining traction Solana ecosystem roundup. Both contexts help explain why a treasury-heavy payments company would consolidate settlement on Solana specifically.
The bottom line: Guo’s argument is that Asia’s lead in stablecoins is less a prediction than an observation about where the pipes, the licenses, and the trade flows already line up. Whether that lead holds depends on how quickly other jurisdictions match the regulatory clarity Hong Kong and Singapore have already shipped.
