“At the beginning of the internet, basically we collapsed the cost of advertising and communication to zero. When broadband came about, the cost of data became zero. And I think the question here is, when we get the movement of money to zero per unit, what new application can we build?”

That framing anchors this episode of On Call with Insignia Ventures, where host Paulo Joquino sits down in person at Insignia’s Singapore office with Yam Ki Chan, Managing Director for Asia Pacific at Circle. The conversation maps Yam Ki’s vantage point at the intersection of finance, technology, and policy, from his years negotiating for the U.S. government on the G20 and G7, through Google Pay and Google Cloud, to leading Circle’s regional buildout. Together they unpack how stablecoins are upgrading the underlying rails of global finance, why Asia’s trade-exposed economies are uniquely positioned to benefit, and what becomes possible when treasury, trade financing, settlement, and even micro-payments can clear 24/7 in seconds. The discussion closes with a candid view on the policy landscape across Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, and Korea, and a builder’s outlook on the trifecta now reshaping the digital economy: AI, stablecoins, and tokenization.

About our Guest

Yam Ki Chan is the Managing Director for Asia Pacific at Circle (NYSE: CRCL), where he is responsible for the company’s business and strategy in the region. He leads a team driving partnerships and market expansion across Asia, and also serves as Managing Director of Circle Singapore. In his time at Circle, he has overseen the enablement of USDC in Japan — the first stablecoin recognized in the country.

Before Circle, Yam Ki spent six years at Google, holding strategy & operations and public policy roles across Google Payments and Google Cloud, where he worked on partnership strategy, market launches, and government affairs in Asia-Pacific. Prior to Google, he served as a Director at the White House National Security Council, where he coordinated the interagency process on U.S. economic strategy in Asia and was a member of the U.S. negotiations team for the G-20 and G-7. Before joining the NSC, he worked at the U.S. Department of the Treasury in the Office of the U.S.–China Strategic and Economic Dialogue and the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. Earlier in his career, he was in technology investment banking at Jefferies in Silicon Valley.

He holds a Master of International Affairs from Columbia University and a Bachelor’s degree in Economics from Carleton College.

Timestamps

1:37 – A Career Across Policy, Tech, and Finance

3:50 – IPO Milestones and the Journey to Trillions

5:39 – Asia Adoption Playbook

8:52 – Real-World USDC Use Cases

11:40 – Upgrading Financial Rails

13:56 – Circle’s Full-Stack Platform

17:00 – Treasury, VC, and Programmable Money

20:59 – Programmable Money and the Bigger Opportunity

26:13 – Southeast Asia’s Role in Stablecoin Adoption

30:00 – Policy Outlook Across Asia

33:00 – A Closing Note for Builders

Transcript

Paulo: Welcome back to On Call with Insignia, where we go on call with leaders innovating the future of Southeast Asia’s internet and digital economy — or as we like to call it, ASEAN Innovation. I’m your host, Paulo Joquino. We are back with another episode where we’re not on call, but actually live, in our office here in Singapore. It’s always great to have guests and get to speak with them in person.

I’m here with Yam Ki Chan from Circle, the Vice President for APAC. Really glad to have him here. Over this last season, we’ve been having a lot of conversations with people in the financial services and financial institutional space, especially about stablecoins and tokenization. Who better to continue this conversation than somebody who’s really worked at the intersection of policy, financial services, and fintech, coming from your time in the US working for the government and now in Singapore working with Circle. Thank you for coming over to our humble office.

Yam Ki: Thank you for having me.

Paulo: I just wanted to start, for our audience who may not be as familiar with your context and background, before we get into the meat of talking about stablecoins, could you share a little bit about what brought you to Singapore? I would love to get that journey from your work in the government leading into Singapore with Circle.

A Career Across Policy, Tech, and Finance

Yam Ki: A couple of through-lines in my career. One is that I work at the intersection of finance, technology, and policy. Where those come together is what I’ve found to be really interesting work — really creative work, and really complex work. Each one of those domains is hugely complicated, and where they come together is where some of the magic happens. But it’s also where it’s really hard to execute an idea, bring it to fruition, and then scale and grow. So that’s where I’ve really enjoyed the work.

The other part of my career is a US–Asia lens — the back and forth, translating between two worlds. I am currently the Head of Asia for Circle. I’ve been in this role for three years, working on the expansion of the Circle platform all across the region, working with some of the top partners, growing USDC circulation, and so on.

Before that, I was with Google for six years, working in Google Pay and Google Cloud on the policy front in Google Hong Kong. And before Google, I was actually in the US government. I had the privilege of working in the Obama administration — first at the Treasury Department and then at the White House National Security Council and National Economic Council, where I was a negotiator for the US on the G20 and the G7, and was involved with every single US–China negotiation from 2010 onwards until the end of the Obama administration. And early in my career, I was a finance guy. I worked in investment banking at Jefferies.

So what I’ve really enjoyed is this place where you’ve got really complex international finance, and you have technology coming in to change it — because technology has transformed, and you know this better than me working in a VC firm, all aspects of the economy. Finance has moved a little slower. The other piece is policy: both finance, and certainly increasingly over the last decade, the importance of policy around technology. How do we think of AI? Of digital assets? How do we think of the usage by minors of technology? All those things now have a policy angle to them. So where all of them come together — it’s a beautiful place to work, and it’s very enjoyable.

IPO Milestones and the Journey to Trillions

Paulo: I’d love to get a sense of — you mentioned before that you were also a witness to the Google IPO and you’ve been through that, been in a company that has really scaled. And Circle [IPO-ed on the NYSE on June 5, 2025 under the ticker CRCL]. Being in the public markets, how has that dynamic shaped the way you think about how these companies try to disrupt or operate within industries that are rapidly changing?

Yam Ki: First of all, an IPO is just a moment in time. It’s a really important milestone for a company. You invest in many of those, and that is one of the quote-unquote “exits” that you think about. But it’s an exit maybe for some of the early investors; for the company, it’s a continuation of a journey.

Circle was founded in 2013, and we went public in 2025. So it was a 12-year journey for Jeremy — our CEO, founder, and chairman — to get to that point. But that’s a moment in time, and we’re actually building now for the next decade. We talk a lot about a journey towards trillions. How do you get to a trillion dollars in circulation? How do you get to a trillion dollars in transaction volume? How do you look at a trillion in trading volume?

Because when you look at where the market is today — despite the fact that for a company like Circle, we went public — we’re at the very early stage. Stablecoin circulation in aggregate, if you’re very broad in your definition of stablecoins, is around $350 billion or so. When you look at the addressable market for money, for M2, it’s in the tens of trillions. So this is a tiny aspect of it. When you look at transactions for financial services, we’re in the trillions a day. For Circle, USDC transactions on chain in the last quarter — Q4 2025 — were around $12 trillion. It’s large. But in the grand scheme of what’s going on, we’re just getting started.

Asia Adoption Playbook

Paulo: And speaking of that journey, getting into the trillions, you’ve been doing a lot of work for that journey in Asia — especially trying to get more institutional adoption of USDC and all of that. Can you share a little bit more about that journey so far, specific to Asia? Did you have any specific realizations that maybe coming in you didn’t really have?

Yam Ki: A few things. The first is that personally, I’ve been in and out of the region ever since I was a kid. I was born in Asia, my family immigrated to the US, and then I started traveling back during college — going back and forth, really, both in my studies as well as in work. So being in Asia itself is not new for me.

For anyone that has spent time in the United States and in Asia, there’s always this view of, wow, the excitement that’s happening, the progress that’s moving, the amount of innovation that’s happening in Asia — it’s unparalleled. The speed at which things are changing — to an American, it feels like coming to the future when you’re in Asia.

At the same time, Asia looks at the US as one of the largest markets, if not the largest market, to enter. It’s also where really core innovation happens. You look at the beginning of the internet, the beginning of the iPhone and smartphone technology, the beginning of application build, and the beginning of AI in terms of the boom and the companies — it’s largely US.

So there’s this really interesting dynamic where there’s hard science, hard innovation that happens, but then the application happens out here in Asia. It takes off, it goes on its own, and it hits billions of people really quickly. The adoption of AI — some of the biggest as a percentage of population are Korea, for example. When you look at real-time payments, India and Singapore have large adoption of digital payments, whereas in the US, people are practically still writing checks. So there’s this really interesting dynamic where you have a little glimpse of the future in terms of hard science in the US, but then the glimpse of the application, and how does it actually change lives, lives here in Asia.

So for me, when I took on the role at Circle, it was really, again, looking at: we have this amazing technology, which is uploading the dollar onto the internet in a safe, compliant, trusted way. And how does the dollar get used in the region? The use of stablecoins, including USDC, was here before USDC or Circle came to Asia. People were already taking, whether it’s USDC or other types of stablecoins, and using it here in the region. So Circle didn’t necessarily need to be here — the adoption was happening. What was important was that Circle looked at where the growth and the applications were: how does it actually get into the hands of users, merchants, and others through intermediaries? A lot of that happens out here. So we started with an office here in Singapore — that’s our regional headquarters. Then we added a team in Taipei, Taiwan; we added a team in Japan; and most recently, we added a team in India. We’re just expanding all around the world.

Real-World USDC Use Cases

Paulo: You mentioned the importance of figuring out what the applications are, specific to the different markets. Are there any — especially with regard to demand for USD — I think you can think about things like B2B trade, supply chain, advance payments, and things like that. Or even credit cards — there are a lot of fintechs in the region that are built around the thesis that there are a lot of travelers here who go in and out, they need to make payments but they don’t want the burden of currency, FX rates, and all that. Any interesting insights into specific use cases that you’ve found?

Yam Ki: Tons. I get asked a lot, “What are the use cases?” And sometimes I chuckle, because it’s like — what is the use case for money? We don’t wake up thinking about what we use money for.

Now, to be fair, you’re not using USDC to go buy coffee here in Singapore. You can, but you need a lot of different things to happen. In the same way that before credit cards and POS machines became popular, it was impossible to use a card. Today, as a matter of fact, FomoPay has a partnership with Volkswagen where you can buy a car with USDC. There are these niche examples. But we need to take a step back.

Really, it’s around: how do we move money seamlessly across borders in the region? That’s where cross-border payment comes in, but related to that is trade financing. It’s pre-funding for a lot of the businesses. It’s about working across public holidays and weekends, especially for dollar clearing, which is dependent on US banks. How do you settle dollar value when the US is on a holiday?

When it’s July 4th, it’s a holiday, and that’s usually a Monday. That’s really difficult for companies here. So we’re seeing companies like Nium using USDC to settle with Visa. They can mint USDC, send it to Visa, and it happens immediately. They don’t have to wait. They don’t have to put as much pre-funding with Visa. We see companies like [Thunes] accepting USDC from their funding partners all around the world, and then being able to pay out — whether it’s in Africa or Southeast Asia or in Europe — funding their partners with USDC to get the pre-funding funded quickly and more frequently than during banking hours.

This is making a huge impact for B2B businesses, and that has a downstream effect for users as well.

And then I’d be remiss if I didn’t talk about trading, of course. The origins of the digital asset market is really digital asset trading, and USDC is one of the many common currencies used for trade settlement. Because if the asset is moving 24/7 on a blockchain, what’s the settlement layer? USDC is that settlement layer. And then for our partners, from that digital settlement layer, whatever they need, they can come out of it in fiat wherever they need to be around the world.

Upgrading Financial Rails

Paulo: I think really the talk of adoption is around settlement — more and more efficient settlement, atomic settlement, as it’s sometimes called — and really reducing the inefficiencies of the world of SWIFT and all this legacy infrastructure. I’m curious to know what your thoughts are in terms of how the other layers of financial services applications — how this could eventually impact things like lending, or even wealth management for consumers. What are your thoughts, and what have you seen so far in terms of that?

Yam Ki: I think we’re at the very beginning of that change. If you take a step back and look at the large technologies coming onto the internet space, every one of these cycles takes about 10 to 15 years, roughly.

The beginning of the internet, when you got modems at 9,600 baud, or 14.4, 28.8, 33.6 — we’re dating ourselves, right? And what it meant to get online. You were in this closed-loop system, eventually moving to an open-loop system. Eventually you got broadband, and then with broadband came video streaming, sending large files, being able to really do e-commerce at scale. And then came the mobile phone, which created a whole new platform — a medium of device interaction anywhere — that brought in new marketplaces, new types of social shopping, GPS-based delivery services, all of this stuff that got built.

One area that hasn’t changed has been finance. Most of the fintech evolution over the last couple of decades — and Asia was a big part of it — has largely been on the interaction and interface level. But the rails underneath, how money actually moved, were still in legacy rails.

The image to think about it: it’s a little bit like water polo, where up top it looks really good — they’re throwing the balls. Down below, they’re kicking like crazy to get things to move in the right places at the right time, over weekends, all that. And now there’s a new way to build that fundamental layer, and hence all of the fintechs and even banks are saying, “That’s a much better way of moving money, of settling.” So now the upgrading of the infrastructure layer is happening. That’s what’s really exciting right now.

Circle’s Full-Stack Platform

Paulo: Speaking of really upgrading that infrastructure layer, you mentioned some examples earlier. But how would you describe broadly how Circle works with various fintechs and different partners? I know you partnered with one of our portfolio companies as well — [StraitsX]. What advice would you have for founders listening in terms of working with partners like you guys?

Yam Ki: First of all, absolutely get in touch.

We have a full stack of services and products that support the ecosystem. What we’ve just talked about is largely USDC. Circle is now on this journey to build a full-stack internet financial system. So if you allow me — think of this full stack starting with the digital asset layer. That’s where USDC, the regulated dollar stablecoin, sits. EURC, which is our euro stablecoin. And USYC, a tokenized money market fund. That’s our asset layer — that’s what people transact with and/or hold.

We’ve gone up the stack and down the stack. Up the stack, we’ve built Circle Payments Network — an orchestration layer that connects different PSPs around the world, such that they can interact with their users or their merchants in fiat or in their local stablecoins. But on a cross-border basis, they’re able to settle with one another using USDC or international stablecoins. We have announced the creation of Stable FX, an FX platform that allows order-takers to interact with the market and swap between different types of stablecoins — whether it’s USDC, EURC, PHP in pesos, or others. That will be a venue for that.

We also announced late last year the creation of a blockchain called [Arc]. This is really fundamental in terms of what we see the future would look like. Arc is the economic OS for the internet. There are many blockchains out there, but when we work with regulators and regulated financial institutions, there are a couple of qualities that they need in a blockchain to feel comfortable building on. Some of those things are a known set of validators — who owns the network, how do you settle, sub-second settlement. Privacy is another. And then also the transaction currency on the blockchain — they want it in a denomination they understand, dollars usually. It’s hard to have some random token that fluctuates in price; it’s hard for CFOs to predict the cost of an application they’re building on a blockchain when not only the blockchain traffic changes but also the token price changes. So we built Arc to have a gas fee using USDC.

All of these are really needed to move the ecosystem to the next level. We expect to see, as this builds out, more financial institutions getting comfortable using different parts of the stack. They can pick and choose. There may be times they would use USDC. There may be times they want to use a PHP stablecoin. They can build it on Arc, they can build it on another blockchain, they can use Circle Payments Network for money movement, or they can use another partner for money movement but use USDC. There are different parts that they can pick and choose, which is really important when you think of what the future looks like — interoperability across the stack up and down, and also in between this stack and those of the other partners building an ecosystem.

Treasury, VC, and Programmable Money

Paulo: I think that gives a lot of options for CFOs especially. One of the other applications that we’ve been interested in is how stablecoins could impact treasury, and how financial leaders manage money — especially those that are multi-market organizations or businesses. Obviously, some of the pain points are being solved already, but thus far, what are the other challenges that CFOs have that you think could potentially be addressed by stablecoins down the line?

Yam Ki: A number of things. We already have some corporate partners that are piloting treasury movement using USDC. These are companies, for example, that move money from Japan to Europe. Normally, the cutoff time in Japan is 10:00 AM. So if you’re on a Friday, you need to move money out of Japan at 10:00 AM, or else you have to wait until Monday. And Monday in Japan at 10:00 AM is Sunday night in the US and still early Monday morning in Europe.

So the ability to move funds more quickly, not only from Asia to the West but also from the West to Asia — to be able to do it on a Friday or Saturday and have it land by Monday morning — makes it more capital efficient. It allows corporates to more easily deploy cash positions all around the world, and for investors, to take advantage of open markets and investment opportunities, as opposed to waiting for your bank to open so you can move money to invest. So that will be a big change in the dynamic.

Paulo: Speaking of investors — how do you see stablecoins also impacting VC? Have you had conversations with investors and/or fund managers about how they want to deploy, and maybe how that impacts fund life cycles and things like that?

Yam Ki: Yeah. We already have various VC firms, and certainly startups, where they take funding in USDC. I’m sure you’ve had trouble where you’ve closed a round, and you have to move $10, $15 million, and it takes four or five days. You get a bunch of questions, and really, you’re like, “I know this person. It’s a cleared account. Why is it taking so long?” Same thing when you go to deploy money. To any founder out there: closing a round is a big celebration, but then there’s the “is the money in the bank?”

And stablecoins solve that problem — you know the money has settled. That’s a huge difference. So that’s the simple stuff.

What gets more interesting, obviously, is what’s coming around agentic payments — essentially machine-to-machine money movement — where you can now build smart contracts with if/then statements: if this happens, then this happens. Think of all the covenants that you have to structure, all the warrants and all the lawyers that are involved. You can do that once and put it in code, and then have locked values that are tied to that transaction with the various milestones — as opposed to: you hit the milestone, then you pick up the phone and say, “Hey, the milestone was hit,” and you’re debating, was it hit at the right time, did we miss it by a day or two. All that stuff — you can now rethink that schedule and the movement of money. I think that will be really big for investors.

And then the other is, beyond USDC, we’re working with a number of venture capital firms and also founders to build on top of Arc. We would love to work with different organizations around the region to be able to do that, because we do believe that is the new economic OS for the internet.

Paulo: We always like to tell our founders: don’t celebrate until the money’s in the bank. You may have closed a round, but you’ve got to make sure that your funding is right there where you can easily access it. Stablecoins definitely make that easier, especially accessing investors that are in different regions and time zones.

Programmable Money and the Bigger Opportunity

Paulo: You mentioned agentic payments, programmable money movement — everybody — I think it was the talk of the town at SFF last year. What are your thoughts on the risks of actually getting this to be a big opportunity that’s widely adopted?

Yam Ki: First, I think it’s important to think about the opportunity and what’s before us. When we think of money movement, there’s so much constraint inherent in how we’ve worked. People are used to taking three days for money to arrive, sometimes longer. Or sending a million dollars and knowing that you’re going to get a call or two, and a bunch of different checks. It’s ingrained — that’s how it works. That all just goes away.

But the idea of how much you need to move money changes as well. You have to think about — for those of us who live in Asia, when do you do your FX transactions? Generally on a Monday or Tuesday night, because you know that’s when markets are open in the States and you have more liquidity. That’s annoying. If money settles 24/7, that kind of goes away. When you have to send money, the rates that you get before sending $1,000 versus $10,000 or $100,000 are different. When money movement becomes cheaper or close to zero, then you’re just dealing with better FX.

All of this will create really interesting opportunities as you have machines negotiating with one another and doing not just $1,000 transactions or $100 transactions, but micro-transactions. They will be essentially building skills, consuming a skill, and then paying for that skill pennies or sub-pennies at a time. We have released in testnet the ability to send one-millionth of a penny of USDC almost gas-free. These are the fundamental building blocks that will get deployed, and other companies will build on top of — whether at the application layer or at the intermediary layer — using these primitives. We don’t know what will be built yet.

I think the opportunity is quite large when you think of all the things that we purchase and/or consume that have to be done and paid for and settled in $25, $50, or $100 chunks. You can now compress that down to pennies at a time.

Paulo: I wonder how that will impact business models of fintechs, or even multi-stakeholder platforms. Have you had conversations with founders in terms of how they’re thinking about leveraging those capabilities?

Yam Ki: Think about it this way. At the beginning of the internet, basically we collapsed the cost of advertising and communication to zero. You needed a catalog of X amount of size before you could ship a catalog, because you’ve got to print it, you’ve got to mail it. It’s got a shelf life of maybe a month. And the prices don’t change because it’s already printed. The internet came along and you can do email lists. You can have daily changes in pricing, or maybe hourly if you want. The cost of advertising essentially collapsed — at least micro-advertising. When broadband came about, the cost of data became zero. Consuming a video was no longer renting a VHS tape or DVD. It’s pushing a button, and it’s on-demand, streamed, and you can consume as much as you want with a library that is larger than one can ever think of. That’s pretty amazing.

I think the question here is: when we get the movement of money to zero per unit, what new application can we build? Some of it, I have an idea. Some of it is going to depend on entrepreneurs that are thinking of new things. When you think of social media creators today — they’re paid in $100 or $200 increments when they cash out. Not because they’re not earning at pennies to cents to dollars per view, but because for the companies that pay them, for the transaction fee to make sense, they need to get to a certain balance before they can cash out. That’s no longer the case.

In Indonesia, for example, the advent of Grab and GoTo was that a driver could earn during the day and cash out at the end of the day — as opposed to waiting until the end of the week. That meant they didn’t have to pay really high rates on credit. They didn’t have to borrow with collateral that included important family savings. They were able to earn — “give me my money today.” This is going to change not just the physical economy, but the digital economy. I can’t yet imagine the new applications that entrepreneurs, especially in this market, will build, because I don’t know. This market builds, not because someone had a grand idea, but out of necessity — and that’s the difference of what drives this market.

Paulo: I think it will definitely shift the value proposition for a lot of companies. Think of concepts like take rates on transactions and things like that. They’ll definitely shift. Obviously, it’s an open question — I think our listeners can definitely push their imagination and reach out to us if you’re building something in that space.

Southeast Asia’s Role in Stablecoin Adoption

Paulo: I want to bring it back to Southeast Asia in particular, and ask: what role do you think the region has — or maybe even Singapore, we can start with that — in terms of driving adoption and pushing the limits of what stablecoins can do globally?

Yam Ki: Great question. Southeast Asia is a really special place, but it’s also a really difficult market.

It’s special because when you look at ASEAN — and whoever decided that term, it’s just picking a bunch of countries — as a group it’s quite large. It’s about 400 to 500 million people as a group. However, we’ve got different currencies, different jurisdictions, different laws. Commerce between members has been difficult — not because people don’t want to do commerce, but because part of that geopolitical challenge is: how do you settle? How do you go from rupiah to dollars, dollars to Sing dollars, or rupee to dollars to Thai baht? Everything has had to come back to some sort of reference currency for interoperability.

Stablecoins that settle 24/7, that are the same as a dollar, can do that without having to work around US banking hours. I think that’s pretty important to think about in terms of the opportunity set.

The other is the market here. Because of the different challenges, you need better standardization. I think APEC, the Asia-Pacific Economic [Cooperation], has done that pretty well in broad Asia. ASEAN has then picked that up. Singapore, obviously, is the most advanced economy in the ASEAN region and can help set that standard. Singapore has an opportunity to set the standard of what a high-quality, well-regulated stablecoin would look like. The MAS has made some proposals. There are probably some additional tweaks to make it more interoperable with international frameworks that allow for foreign-issued, well-regulated stablecoins to operate clearly in the market. I think there is some work to do, but if Singapore sets that standard, it would alleviate a lot of the coordination and harmonization needed in the region.

Paulo: I remember a few years ago there was a lot of talk about having an ASEAN currency and things like that. But obviously, with stablecoins, that sort of — you don’t really need to go through all the loops and hoops to make that happen.

Yam Ki: It’s not that you don’t need it. I think you can take a different path to the way you get there. The ASEAN currency, as an international economist, grew out of the experiment that was happening in Europe — where you had the euro, and what it meant in terms of interregional trade.

One thing to keep in mind is, when you look at Asian economies, we all have very high trade-to-GDP ratios. We’re very trade-exposed, and many of us also have a high capital account. So our economies are exposed to capital movement. It’s different in the United States and in Europe, which are largely closed. Despite the size of the US, trade as a share of GDP is actually not that large. Same with Europe — when you remove intra-European trade, because they can trade with one another, inter-European trade is not the same as what is happening here in Asia.

The analogy I use is: buying and selling something between San Francisco and New York, or between Paris and Berlin, is easy. Here, you’ve got a company sitting in Singapore. It’s producing something in Indonesia or the Philippines. The buyer sits in Korea. You’re collecting in won, or yen if you’re in Japan. And then you’re paying your vendor in rupiah or rupee or Thai baht. It’s much more complicated, and those are costs to the businesses here that don’t occur for businesses in the US and Europe.

Paulo: I think that’s really part of the explanation for why a lot of emerging markets are also very early adopters — not just of stablecoins, but of other blockchain-based tokens and digital innovations. That makes a lot of sense.

Policy Outlook Across Asia

Paulo: I wanted to bring it back to policy as well and ask: what are you excited about from a policy perspective here in the region? Earlier last month, Hong Kong announced a couple of new licenses for stablecoins. I was putting together an article comparing the US timeline versus a lot of Asian countries. And even though [GENIUS and CLARITY] were announced pretty early on and maybe, quote-unquote, “inspired a lot of governments to act,” the pace has been surprisingly a lot faster in Asia. So what are you excited about in this region, policy-wise?

Yam Ki: Asia’s a big region. It’s not homogenous, and therefore some move quicker than others. Singapore was the first country to have developed a digital payment token regime. It could upgrade to reflect how the markets work today. Japan is actually the first country in the world to pass a stablecoin regime, believe it or not. And Europe was the first to have one implemented — MiCA was the first stablecoin regime implemented in a jurisdiction.

You mentioned Hong Kong. Hong Kong passed a law last year. It came into effect in August, and then they just awarded the first set of licenses in April. We were in Hong Kong last month meeting with the various stakeholders to understand how that’s developing and what it looks like. It’s moving very fast.

In the region, aside from Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan, Korea is working through legislation. Australia has also proposed laws. There are various conversations happening — whether it’s in Taiwan, in Thailand, in Vietnam, and other places — but not as far along as Hong Kong and Japan.

Everyone is moving, in large part, because the US has. Whether we like it or not, the US does have an outsized influence on international rules, and particularly on finance, especially where the dollar is the world’s reserve currency. So when the [GENIUS Act] had passed, it really put to bed whether stablecoin is real or not at a national level in the United States. Stablecoin existed at the state level, but [GENIUS] essentially defined that this is a regulated instrument. This is what a good stablecoin looks like. That was very well defined, and most of the rules that you see around the world now track or are similar to what the GENIUS Act has. And the international organizations — whether it’s the [FSB or BIS] and others — are coalescing around that to define the new rules going forward.

A Closing Note for Builders

Paulo: It’s definitely exciting to see, and a lot more institutions — obviously, MAS has played a huge part here in this region, because we’ve partnered with companies like StraitsX. We’ve definitely seen their journey — and it was not an easy journey, especially if you’re one of the early movers and all of that.

To wrap up our conversation, I would love for you to share a message to our audience in terms of — a lot of people talk about all these opportunities, but things that they should keep in mind as they build. Maybe in terms of a policy perspective, a risk perspective, or even a macro perspective. That’s a lot — no need to cover all three. Just giving you some options.

Yam Ki: We talked a little bit about this before we started filming — it’s the trifecta of things.

It’s very clear at the moment that the trifecta is AI, stablecoins, and tokenization. Those are the three pieces. Essentially, it’s: what is the technology that’s changing all industries? AI is happening. And then what part of the economy is fundamentally adjusting? That’s finance. The finance piece has the settlement layer, which is stablecoins, and then the investment layer, which is tokenization — putting things onto the blockchain.

You can’t go wrong operating in that space, and we are definitely in that space. We’re building technologies on that, and we’re working with lots of different partners who are also building on that stack — on those three corners, if not right in the middle of those three areas.

It’s an amazing time to be building. Coming out of COVID, it wasn’t that long ago that it felt like the world had stopped. And coming out of COVID, there was the adjustment period and high inflation, and other things that we couldn’t quite figure out — where the world’s going. We still have some of that. But as a builder, this is an amazing time, because rarely do you get to ride the waves of multiple threads that are moving together in tandem and not only transforming existing industries but creating new ones along with it. It’s a really good time to build.

Paulo: On that note, thank you so much, Yam Ki, for joining us on this conversation. I’m sure we could have talked about a lot more topics, but I think the one on everyone’s mind is really what the stablecoin opportunity means for their companies. Whether you’re in fintech or not, it’s definitely wide-reaching in terms of impact on applications. Thank you, Yam Ki, for joining us and sharing a little bit more of your insights on this topic.

References

• Yam Ki Chan bio and current role at Circle — Singapore Fintech Festival Speaker Profile
• Circle IPO on NYSE (ticker CRCL) on June 5, 2025 — Bloomberg: Circle Founder Is a Billionaire as Crypto Firm Jumps After IPO; FinTech Weekly: Circle Raises $1.05 Billion in Blockbuster IPO
• Circle founded in 2013 by Jeremy Allaire and Sean Neville — Circle Internet Group, Wikipedia
• Thunes–Circle USDC settlement partnership — Circle Case Study: Always-On Cross-Border Payments with Thunes and USDC; Thunes: Powering stablecoin liquidity for payments
• StraitsX (Insignia portfolio company) referenced in conversation — corrected from transcribed “SpaceX”
• GENIUS Act and CLARITY Act — U.S. federal stablecoin / digital asset legislation referenced; transcript spelling normalized
• APEC: Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation — name corrected from transcribed “Corporation”
• Arc blockchain (Circle) — Circle’s announced Layer-1 blockchain with USDC as the native gas token