Regulators across Asia are calling their banks with an instruction American lenders never got: prepare for stablecoins, ready or not. John Cho sits in those conversations for a living.
Hong Kong wrote a dedicated stablecoin ordinance into law in 2025. "Singapore, Japan also like South Korea, all these countries basically like, you know speed running, trying to pass stablecoin legislation into law," John Cho, Kaia DLT Foundation's chief stablecoin officer, said on the On The Margin podcast. Cho also runs Ratio, a stablecoin FX startup. Before that he helped steer the merger of Kakao's Klaytn and LINE's Finschia into the Kaia blockchain.
"There’s a lot of lawmakers and regulators that are actually reaching out directly to banks in Asia telling them, hey look, we're going to be passing stablecoin legislation very soon. This is very good for the local currency. There's going to be a lot of cost savings efficiencies, blah, blah, blah. I want you guys to be ready when the legislation is written to law. So start preparing today," he said. That pressure, more than any conversion story, sits behind the wave of bank stablecoin projects now running across the region. "It's not again necessarily because they love stablecoins, but they kind of have to adopt stablecoins," Cho said.
'A Massive Blue Ocean'
"I think people who don't have much experience with Asia just think it's very monolithic, but it's actually not right," Cho said. "It's a melting pot of different cultures. And at the same time, it's also one of the most fragmented regions in the world, especially when it comes to financial infrastructure." He calls that fragmentation "a massive blue ocean," and says the incumbent issuers have noticed: "I can tell you for a fact everyone from Tether to Circle to everybody else very much focused on building and growing and scaling in Asia."
In Japan, Cho said, "they want to have stablecoin reserves onshore," which is why Circle's USDC, distributed through SBI, remains the only global dollar stablecoin approved there while Tether builds jurisdiction-specific versions. "The biggest opportunities are always in regions where there's high friction," Cho said.
'Someone Was Eating That FX'
Cho's least consensus call is that the winners will not all be dollars. "Stablecoin technology will actually help facilitate more adoption of local currencies," he said, a shift already visible in the $1.2 billion non-dollar stablecoin market. "But say you have easy access to the Japanese yen or the Korean won or even the Chinese RMB. I think then you're going to have to you'll probably end up thinking about it a little bit more," Cho said.
"Because in reality, what had always happened was that they were moving out of whatever the native currency was, and it was just denominating everything in a foreign currency, and someone was eating that FX," Brian Mehler, CEO of the payments chain Stable, said on the On The Margin podcast of the emerging-market corridors that dollarized by default.
The ground-level version of that trade already runs through Asia's super-app payment rails. "Users now can convert their crypto into their local currency, Taka, and send it directly to their mobile payment apps, which is called bKash and Nagad, which are the cash apps equivalent in Bangladesh," Alvin Kan, Bitget Wallet's chief operating officer, said on the On The Margin podcast. The dollar still pulls in the other direction, Kan said: "They need digital dollars for various reasons. And one of them is that there are certain services where they're required to pay in USD. And it's a lot cheaper when you have a USD crypto card versus you pay in local currency and have to pay FX fees and so on."
'All Of That Will Be Invisible'
"One of the biggest misconceptions is that if we integrate stablecoin rails, we'll automatically save money," Cho said. Much of his time goes to walking enterprises back from it, the same last-mile economics Payoneer's CEO has described.
On-ramps stay expensive because a few licensed providers gatekeep them. On-chain FX rates also carry a premium over the screen price, he said. "If it's not implemented correctly stablecoin rails can potentially become actually more expensive," he said.
His timeline for the region is specific: "in 24 to 36 months every country in Asia would have passed some form of stablecoin specific legislation," Cho said, and the drafters are comparing notes. "South Korean regulators and lawmakers are talking to regulators in Hong Kong and Japan," he said. By 2031 he expects the vocabulary itself to retire. "Chances are no one is actually going to be using the term stablecoin or no one's going to be using the term blockchain," Cho said. "Everything will technically be invisible behind products." Consumers, he added, "probably won't even need to know and I think all of that will be invisible."