This special episode, recorded live at the Insignia Ventures Partners office at the Singapore Exchange Centre in Singapore with VP of Strategic Development and Operations Allen Chng, explores a question that feels increasingly urgent: if money is becoming more digitally-native, what happens to the systems built for an earlier era? Drawing on Hassan Ahmed’s experience across traditional finance, fintech, and now Coinbase Singapore, the conversation unpacks why stablecoins are gaining traction, why Singapore matters in that shift, and where new opportunities may emerge for builders and investors.

About the Guest

Hassan Ahmed is the CEO and Country Director for Coinbase Singapore. Based in Singapore, he leads Coinbase’s operations and strategy in the Southeast Asia region, focusing on expanding the platform’s presence, fostering partnerships, and supporting the local developer ecosystem. Before joining Coinbase, Hassan served as CEO of Coins.ph, a major crypto brokerage in the Philippines, and Head of Strategy for GoPay in Indonesia under GoTo Group. He also held roles in New York, including at eToro USA as Director of Finance & Operations, Venmo as the Head of Business Operations, and Merrill Lynch as the Vice President of Strategy and Business Development. Hassan holds an MBA from Harvard Business School.

Timestamps

(02:15) Three Generations of Money

(05:47) Stablecoins and Wall Street

(11:10) The Role of Singapore for Coinbase in Asia

(15:11) Agent Payments and Coinbase’s X402

(19:01) Builder Risks and Stablecoin Rules

(22:56) Future of Payments: Agentic Commerce, Local Stablecoins

(26:28) Unbanked to Unbrokered: The Next Big Fintech Innovation Wave

(28:37) Outlook for Builders and Investors

Directed by Paulo Joquiño

Produced by Paulo Joquiño

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The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any Insignia Ventures fund. Any and all opinions shared in this episode are solely personal thoughts and reflections of the guest and the host.

Transcript

Allen: Welcome back to On Call with Insignia, where we interview leaders, founders, and operators building the future of Southeast Asia’s digital economy. Today, we have a guest who is one of the most insightful operators working at the intersection of payments infrastructure and stablecoins in the region.

We have been watching digital assets move beyond the speculative fringe and toward more established regulatory frameworks. In the United States, you have the GENIUS Act, and in Europe, you have MiCA. Over here in Asia, you also have regulatory developments in Singapore and Hong Kong. At the same time, a great deal in Web3 is becoming increasingly institutional, especially with more activity coming out of Wall Street.

Our guest today has lived through several eras of financial services, from Merrill Lynch to Venmo in the United States, and then into Southeast Asia, where he now leads Coinbase’s Singapore operations. He is also someone who thinks rigorously about the future of money. Please let me welcome Hassan Ahmed, Singapore Country Director at Coinbase. Welcome, Hassan.

Hassan: Thank you for having me.

Three Generations of Money

Allen: Let’s jump right into it. To set the tone for the conversation, you have had a well-storied career across many areas of financial services, and I would love to get your view specifically on payments: how it has evolved over the years as you have taken on different leadership roles, and how those waves of innovation have shaped your career.

Hassan: That’s a great question. My team jokes with me that I’ve built through three different generations of money. I’ve been fortunate to see several different waves across financial services, and payments in particular.

I started out my career in traditional finance. I was at Merrill Lynch Wealth Management and later at Credit Suisse, so I got a firsthand view of how traditional financial institutions and legacy systems are set up and how they have scaled over time.

I eventually got restless and moved toward fintech. I was fortunate to join Venmo after the PayPal acquisition. That was probably the first time I realized that consumer financial services were increasingly moving toward what I would call financial experiences.

If you rewind to that period, companies like Uber were starting to break out, and people were comparing experiences across categories. They would ask why the Uber app worked one way while their bank app still felt clunky, or why many banks still did not even have functional mobile apps. When Venmo came along, it created a real breakthrough in experience design. It made something as simple as domestic peer-to-peer payments instant and free for consumers.

It also added delight on top of the transaction. You could attach payment notes, use emojis, and interact with it in a way that felt social. That combination created real product-market fit. Frankly, it was one of the only true consumer payments breakouts in the United States over the last decade when it happened.

For me, that was eye-opening. It showed just how far consumer expectations had moved, and how all financial services providers would eventually have to respond.

At the same time, after spending a few years at Venmo, I had another key realization. Even though the experience layer had improved dramatically, much of it was still just a wrapper around legacy rails and legacy settlement systems. Most fintech experiences in the United States still sat on top of a bank where the custody and settlement happened, and those underlying pipes were still effectively the same old systems.

When I came across the Bitcoin white paper and started looking more seriously into the technology, it became increasingly clear to me that while the front end of finance was evolving, this was a possible solution to the backend of financial plumbing. Here was an internet-native ledger that did not necessarily require the same intermediaries, and that could be global from day one.

I think that was a huge R&D breakthrough, a computer-science breakthrough, and really a gift to the world from Satoshi Nakamoto. It gave people open-source infrastructure that they could build on. That said, it took a long time for that R&D to become a usable technology, and then a product, and then something that could move into the mainstream. That is where we are today.

Allen: I really like the way you frame that. Fintech changed the experience layer by making things more customer-centric, but the settlement layer still had to move through multiple correspondent banks whenever transactions crossed borders. That, in the end, created customer frustration.

But I think we are moving very fast now. With many technology transitions, it takes time for the right regulatory frameworks, institutional adoption, and trust to come into place. Once those conditions align, the shift can happen quickly, and that seems to be what we are seeing now.

Stablecoins and Wall Street

That leads well into another trend we are seeing. Bitcoin initially emerged around a digital-gold thesis, and much of Web3 used to be associated with speculation and store-of-value narratives. More recently, though, there has been a major shift toward stablecoin utility and, in the United States in particular, toward tokenization. How do you see recent developments, including partnerships between Wall Street institutions and Coinbase, affecting stablecoin momentum and adoption, especially from what you see in Singapore and the broader Southeast Asian market?

Hassan: It has been a very transformative cycle for crypto. Over the last four years, while there was a lot of cleansing and purging in the industry, a huge amount of work was also happening behind the scenes. One major area was technology scaling.

Today, blockchains are much more performant than they were a few years ago. Up to around 2021, people worried that Ethereum, as the main smart-contract layer, could only handle limited throughput, and that if there was an NFT mint, gas fees could spike to absurd levels. No one really talks about that in the same way anymore.

With Base, which is our layer-two network, and with high-performance layer ones like Solana, throughput has increased dramatically. Transactions that settle in under a second and cost less than a cent are now commonplace. There is still more progress to be made, but that is a major unlock the industry has achieved.

The second major change is the regulatory posture. In the United States, regulation had been the primary choke point. There was an era of regulation by enforcement. At this point, that is fading, and the posture is shifting toward clearer rules of the road and a more explicit question of how the United States can lead in both crypto and AI.

Against that backdrop, the key headline is that the industry has matured. You can see that in the way institutions have moved toward digital assets and stablecoins. Our partnership with BlackRock and the launch of ETFs were big coming-out moments for the industry. In some ways, those ETFs were like Bitcoin’s IPO because they helped bridge traditional pools of capital into crypto.

We have also seen banks move in with much greater seriousness. The GENIUS Act has been a major catalyst, especially for stablecoins in the United States. Every major bank seems to have some stablecoin program, and what is different now is that this is not just a story of announcements and pilots. Many of them are moving into production because they believe the opportunity is now large enough to matter.

Allen: I particularly like your point that the technology has matured enough that speed and reliability have improved so significantly. During the earlier phases of the market, I remember needing to wait at my computer just to catch a better moment for gas fees. The progress since then is remarkable.

At the same time, the institutional trust layer matters enormously. The more people read about firms like BlackRock entering the space, the more digital assets feel mainstream rather than niche.

Hassan: That is exactly right. The old mental model was that the crypto economy and traditional finance were separate worlds. The reality now is that they have increasingly intersected and collided. In many cases, the biggest institutions are now the ones helping propagate digital-asset adoption, so the tenor of the conversation has changed completely.

Allen: It is a bit like the internet era. People once spoke about a separate online world versus the traditional one, but today it is all just one digital world. I think finance is going through a similar transition.

Hassan: One way to think about it is that these are major technology waves that come along and reshape industries. Every incumbent has a choice about whether to adopt, whether to invest, and ultimately whether to win or lose. In financial services, regulation is a baseline requirement, because institutions need confidence that if they adopt something new, they are not putting the rest of their franchise at risk. That is why the GENIUS Act matters so much, and why we are also hopeful the CLARITY Act in the United States will pass.

The Role of Singapore for Coinbase in Asia

Allen: That is a good segue. Since we are talking about regulation, retail adoption generally follows institutional adoption, and institutional adoption often follows regulatory positioning. Singapore has been an early mover on the regulatory side. What role has Singapore played for Coinbase in Asia, both as a presence on the ground and as a regional operating base for tokenized assets and related work?

Hassan: Singapore has been very smart in how it thinks long term. It has fantastic infrastructure, both physical and legal, and it is a very pro-business environment. The government operates at a high level in terms of thinking ahead, mapping policy objectives, and then implementing against them.

This is an open economy and a major financial hub. I would say there was already a significant push to position Singapore as a fintech hub from the late 1990s into the early 2000s. Within that broader development, when the Payment Services Act was introduced in 2019, it created a legal framework for digital payment tokens and gave the industry clearer rules of the road.

For companies operating in crypto, that meant greater clarity on what type of licensing was required and what supervisory obligations would apply. If you compare that to periods when the United States was trying to drive activity offshore, Singapore made a great deal of sense as a hub for a global company like Coinbase.

We already had a strong presence in places like the UK, but Singapore felt like the natural Asia hub. We knew we were going to enter Asia more deeply at some point, and once the licensing regime was announced, it reinforced our belief that this was the right place to build from.

Allen: I have always thought that clearer rules can sometimes encourage innovation rather than suppress it. When boundaries are clear, people know where they can push and where new experiments can take place, especially if there is a sandbox-like environment.

Hassan: We have been fortunate. Since I started the office here about five years ago, we have grown significantly. We now have an engineering hub in Singapore in partnership with EDB. We also received our Digital Payment Token licence a few years ago, and as you become more integrated into the local community and industry, it creates additional opportunities.

We want to be good corporate citizens and help grow the digital-assets ecosystem in Singapore. So when BLOOM came up as an opportunity, we were very excited about it. [BLOOM, launched by MAS on 16 October 2025, stands for Borderless, Liquid, Open, Online, Multi-currency and is intended to strengthen Singapore’s financial infrastructure through settlement assets including tokenised bank money and regulated stablecoins.] [1] [Coinbase is listed by MAS as one of the initiative’s members.] [1]

We have seen earlier MAS initiatives such as Project Guardian and Project Orchid, and BLOOM feels like an evolution of that thinking around programmable money. One of the areas we have been investing in is agentic payments, which is still very frontier, but we think it is a substantive theme that will matter in the coming years.

Future of Payments: Agentic Commerce and Local Stablecoins

Allen: Before this conversation, I listened to some of your other podcast interviews, and agentic payments is something I have heard you talk about before. It is especially interesting now because so much attention is on AI adoption. When you combine AI with payments and with the programmability of stablecoins, the possibilities become quite powerful. From your perspective, what are some of the challenges Southeast Asia will need to overcome before this reaches mass adoption, and what should builders prioritize right now?

Hassan: I would say agentic commerce and agentic payments have burst onto the scene somewhat, and at times the industry may be overhyping them in the short term. My intuition is that this is one of those classic cases where we overestimate what can happen in the near term and vastly underestimate what it could become in the long term.

The key green shoot is that AI agents are becoming more empowered. We are moving from basic chat-based question-and-answer systems toward agents that can take actions on our behalf. The natural next question is how those agents will pay for things, access resources, and transact autonomously.

If agents are internet-native and digital-native, then they need a digitally native form of money. That is where we see this symbiotic relationship between AI agents and crypto wallets funded by stablecoins. Agents could pay for firewall resources, API calls, or other small units of digital value through programmable micropayments.

Today, the normal way a human accesses an API involves creating a login, attaching a payment method, and then using the service. That works for us, even if it is still a little high-friction. But if you really want to unleash the power of agents, the payment system probably has to become stablecoin-funded and machine-native.

That is part of what we are trying to solve. We introduced a protocol called x402, developed by one of our engineers, and open-sourced it as a neutral standard so developers can begin instantiating agent-driven payments more easily. We have also been working with companies like Google, Stripe, Visa, and others because we think everyone is pushing toward the same future in which agents become a new economic actor on the internet.

There is one scenario, which I think is quite plausible, in which agentic commerce becomes larger than human-driven commerce in the future.

Allen: It is fascinating that you are building at the infrastructure layer in a way that invites many other actors to participate on top of it. In many technology waves, new infrastructure expands the total addressable market of an industry, whether that is payments, wealth management, or tokenized finance. It feels like that is what is happening here as well.

Builder Risks and Stablecoin Rules

Let’s talk about risk. While digital assets have gained wider institutional and mainstream acceptance, what are some of the biggest risks that operators and builders still need to keep an eye on?

Hassan: This is a fast-growing and evolving area. It sits at the intersection of technology and financial services, so there are naturally several layers of complexity.

For entrepreneurs, I would say that stablecoins have especially strong product-market fit in areas like payments, cross-border payments, payouts, and anything involving international movement of money. Builders should take stablecoins very seriously.

If you look at the mix of payment flows between wires, cards, and stablecoins, the network effects are increasingly building in favor of stablecoins. The acceptance and origination side of the market is being built out in real time.

That said, regulatory clarity matters enormously. In Singapore, there is now a stronger framework emerging around single-currency stablecoins. [Coinbase’s XSGD page describes XSGD, created by StraitsX, as a Singapore-dollar stablecoin designed to be pegged and redeemable 1:1 with SGD.] [2] [Coinbase also states that users can convert between SGD and XSGD with zero Coinbase fees.] [2] That kind of framework gives users and institutions more assurance around reserves, backing, attestations, and audits.

There are also less-discussed issues that matter in practice, such as tax treatment and operational integrations. In Singapore, capital gains treatment is relatively different from many other countries, so some of those concerns are less acute, but globally people are still wrestling with how to account for tiny gains or losses when stablecoins move in secondary markets.

On top of that, companies need ERP integrations and back-office workflows that fit their existing systems. Most businesses do not want to rebuild their entire operational stack just to work with stablecoins, so that enabling layer also has to mature.

Allen: That is a very useful framing. People are also talking more about yield-bearing stablecoins now, which raises the line between money-like instruments and securities-like risk.

Hassan: Exactly. You can choose to take on more risk, but then you need to understand what kind of risk you are taking. It may be regulatory risk, illiquidity risk, or risk that a structure ends up being treated as something like a collective investment scheme. Sometimes early movers gain an advantage, but they still need to know what they are getting into.

Allen: The point around audit trails is also important. Stablecoins are only as trustworthy as the confidence users have that reserves are fully backed, liquid, and properly managed.

The Role of Local Stablecoins and the StraitsX Partnership

From that perspective, how do you see stablecoins driving wider usage? I think this is particularly relevant given Coinbase’s partnership with StraitsX, which is one of our portfolio companies.

Hassan: I would set the stage by saying that stablecoins are currently still relatively early in their total addressable market, but the secular tailwind is very strong. Adoption is growing rapidly, and all signs point to that continuing.

Highly trusted dollar-backed stablecoins have created institutional confidence, especially as clearer regulatory frameworks emerge. But beyond USD stablecoins, one of the more exciting themes for builders and entrepreneurs is the rise of local or non-USD stablecoins.

Today, USD-backed stablecoins make up the overwhelming majority of on-chain stablecoin value. But if traditional FX markets and on-chain FX markets converge over time, then non-USD stablecoins should eventually take a larger share. Goods and services are priced in local currencies, and as more cross-border commerce moves on-chain, users and merchants may increasingly choose to hold value in stablecoins instead of constantly liquidating back to fiat.

I have known Tianwei, the founder of StraitsX, for some time. We were very excited about the potential for XSGD to be accessible on Coinbase Singapore and on Coinbase globally. [Coinbase describes XSGD as being created by StraitsX and available on Coinbase, with quick conversion between SGD and XSGD.] [2] That was an important starting point for us, and we are excited to grow the partnership over time.

Allen: That is especially important because local stablecoins need broad access and liquidity in order to become truly useful. Without that, the ecosystem cannot scale.

I also remember hearing you discuss the “stablecoin sandwich” mental model on another podcast.

Hassan: Yes, the stablecoin sandwich.

Allen: Right. It is a clarifying model because in some cases it is almost like half a sandwich: value moves into the stablecoin and then stays there.

Hassan: Exactly. Maybe you could call it an open-faced sandwich.

Partnership Priorities for Fintechs

Allen: Zooming out from StraitsX, I am sure many listeners would also want to understand where other fintechs might be able to collaborate with Coinbase. What kinds of partnership areas should they be thinking about?

Hassan: In Singapore, we provide regulated onshore services. For consumers, accredited investors, and businesses, we offer on-ramping and off-ramping in both SGD and USD. We support sending and receiving, trading products, and we support USDC in a meaningful way alongside XSGD.

Beyond Singapore, we also have a broader international footprint. We are active in Australia, India, Europe, Canada, Brazil, and of course the United States. That gives us consumer distribution, institutional relationships, and a fairly large two-sided marketplace.

When we think about partnerships, there are a few important categories. One is crypto-as-a-service, which is essentially a white-labeled externalization of core capabilities so other companies can light up crypto features within their own platforms. Another is support for stablecoin issuers that want to launch on Base or eventually on Coinbase. And then for payments companies, we have APIs and SDKs that can plug into acceptance products and make use of Coinbase balances and distribution.

Unbanked to Unbrokered: The Next Fintech Innovation Wave

Allen: Singapore is a strong base because of trust in the regulatory framework, but the broader Southeast Asia region is one of the most active markets in crypto participation. Many young, digitally native users are encountering capital markets for the first time through stablecoins and crypto rather than through traditional local instruments. That seems very significant.

Hassan: Southeast Asia is definitely one of the most dynamic regions we see. It has a young, tech-forward population, and adoption came both early and enthusiastically.

One interesting example was Axie Infinity. It was a fascinating Southeast Asian phenomenon in which something built in Vietnam was consumed heavily in the Philippines. For what it is worth, I was even running a gaming guild at that time with Filipino scholars, and there were real stories of people earning money, paying for family medical bills, or improving their homes.

I do not think the token economics were ultimately sustainable, and it did implode to some degree. But it still told us something important. Young people are clearly saying that they want access to financial services and pathways to improve their lives. In many geographies, those options remain limited.

In many countries, real estate is still seen as the primary path to wealth accumulation, but there is an affordability crisis almost everywhere. Local stock exchanges are not always deep or liquid enough to create broad opportunity either. So younger users are looking for access to global opportunities, and financial services are gradually being democratized. Crypto is just one part of that wider story.

One of the biggest themes we have observed is that the action in fintech is shifting from the unbanked to the unbrokered. That is going to be a major theme over the next decade.

Allen: I really like that framing. We invest in many fintech companies in the region, and one of the major themes we see is wealth management. In markets such as Vietnam, many savers still think first about how to afford property. At the same time, once clearer rules and local infrastructure emerge, adoption becomes safer and more scalable.

Outlook for Builders and Investors

Hassan: One of the questions I often get is how people should get started safely. My usual advice is fairly simple.

First, look for onshore regulated options. Offshore exchanges may have a role, but in 2026 the landscape is safer than it used to be, and people should take advantage of that.

Second, start with small amounts of money. I often tell people to begin with USDC so they do not have to absorb volatility immediately. Just send a small amount to a friend and get a feel for the user experience.

Third, if someone wants to go a step further, Bitcoin is a more sensible place to begin than chasing speculative names. The one thing I specifically advise people not to do is buy whatever hot token someone recommends in a WhatsApp group.

Allen: The further people distance themselves from the noise of “diamond hands” and “to the moon” culture, the easier it is to think more clearly about exposure and long-term participation.

We are seeing similar patterns with companies in the region as well. In Indonesia, for example, digital brokerages are opening up access to crypto so that people are not limited only to local equities. Local-currency stablecoins, merchant acquiring, cross-border payments, and programmatic money all create new possibilities.

Hassan: Indonesia is particularly interesting. At this point, it may have more crypto investors than stock investors. More broadly, we have seen survey data suggesting that digital assets are already finding their place in many portfolios.

If I were building something today on a three-year timeframe and wanted venture-backable scale, I would still focus heavily on the stablecoin theme. The product-market fit is strong, the tailwinds are large, and the total addressable market is enormous.

If I were building on a ten-year timeframe, I would probably start with agent payments. It is still early, and we will almost certainly go through a hype cycle, then some disappointment, and then emerge on the other side with something much more substantial.

Allen: Thanks for sharing that. This has been a fascinating conversation. Thank you so much for spending the time with us. I have certainly taken away a lot, and I am sure our listeners have as well.

Hassan: Thank you. Great to be here, and thank you so much for having me.

References

[1]: Monetary Authority of Singapore. “BLOOM.” Published 16 October 2025. https://www.mas.gov.sg/schemes-and-initiatives/bloom

[2]: Coinbase. “XSGD | Now on Coinbase.” https://www.coinbase.com/en-sg/xsgd