Stablecoins have moved from crypto native curiosity to serious financial infrastructure and nowhere is that shift more consequential than Asia, where dollar-denominated settlement sits at the intersection of regulatory complexity, booming Web3 adoption, and chronically underserved developer tooling. Stablecoins have moved from crypto native curiosity to serious financial infrastructure and nowhere is that shift more consequential than Asia, where dollar-denominated settlement sits at the intersection of regulatory complexity, booming Web3 adoption, and chronically underserved developer tooling. Stablecoins have moved from crypto native curiosity to serious financial infrastructure and nowhere is that shift more consequential than Asia, where dollar-denominated settlement sits at the intersection of regulatory complexity, booming Web3 adoption, and chronically underserved developer tooling. Stables is betting it can own that infrastructure layer. I sat down with Bernardo Bilotta, Co-founder and CEO of Stables, to understand what they're building, why Asia, and whether the "Stripe for stablecoins" label actually fits. Stables Stables Ishan Pandey: Hi Bernardo, welcome to our "Behind the Startup" series. Tell us about yourself and what led you to build Stables? Ishan Pandey: Hi Bernardo, welcome to our "Behind the Startup" series. Tell us about yourself and what led you to build Stables? Bernardo Bilotta: 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 more than 10 million users as Head of Mobile at Zip Co. That background gave me a very clear understanding of what consumer-grade financial products look like, and stablecoin wallets and experiences in 2021 were nowhere close. Bernardo Bilotta: 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 stablecoin 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 stablecoin payments existed, certainly not in Asia. No 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 Li had built Readii to over $20 million in ARR and understood how to scale commercial operations. David Nichols is a lawyer with 20 years in banking risk and compliance, including co-founding Xinja 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. Ishan Pandey: Stables launched in 2021 as a stablecoin neobank. What changed internally, in the market or in your own thinking, that led you to open up your infrastructure to developers as a B2B API platform? Ishan Pandey: Stables launched in 2021 as a stablecoin neobank. What changed internally, in the market or in your own thinking, that led you to open up your infrastructure to developers as a B2B API platform? Bernardo Bilotta: We built the consumer wallet first because we needed to. There was no off-the-shelf infrastructure for stablecoin 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. Bernardo Bilotta: What changed was the realisation 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 recognising that the infrastructure was the product. The wallet was a proof of concept; the rails were the business. Once we opened those APIs to other developers, volume grew 8x in a matter of months. That told us 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 stablecoins 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. Ishan Pandey: You're specifically focused on building compliant USDT rails for the Asian Web3 market. Asia is the largest remittance recipient region in the world, yet you've said the stablecoin infrastructure there remains deeply fragmented. What structural problem are you solving that existing players have failed to address? Ishan Pandey: You're specifically focused on building compliant USDT rails for the Asian Web3 market. Asia is the largest remittance recipient region in the world, yet you've said the stablecoin infrastructure there remains deeply fragmented. What structural problem are you solving that existing players have failed to address? Bernardo Bilotta: The numbers tell the story pretty clearly. Only about 1% of local banks in Asia are willing to work closely with stablecoin businesses. There are roughly 150 currencies in the region that need stablecoin connectivity. And as of our last analysis, there were zero licensed orchestration platforms purpose-built for USDT in Asia. Zero. Bernardo Bilotta: That's the structural problem. Asia drives approximately 60% of global stablecoin payment flows, yet there's been a massive overinvestment in the US and Latin America when it comes to stablecoin 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 optimised for different stablecoin 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 stablecoin 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. Ishan Pandey: 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? Ishan Pandey: 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 Bilotta: The corridor trap is real, and it's the single biggest reason stablecoin 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. Bernardo Bilotta: 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 stablecoin-to-fiat conversion with a clean audit trail. The Transfer layer handles orchestration across both fiat and stablecoin rails, including virtual accounts, banking rails, on-chain settlement, and deep stablecoin-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 licences 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 their end users' experience, then the infrastructure has failed. Our job is to make all of that invisible. Ishan Pandey: You've processed over a billion dollars in retail transactions and support payments across 19 blockchain networks. Most stablecoin 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 stablecoin strategy? Ishan Pandey: You've processed over a billion dollars in retail transactions and support payments across 19 blockchain networks. Most stablecoin 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 stablecoin strategy? Bernardo Bilotta: 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 stablecoin adoption in a business context have nothing to do with which L1 or L2 you settle on. Bernardo Bilotta: The questions enterprises should be asking are more fundamental. Can I move USDT into and out of the local currencies my customers use, reliably, at scale? Can I do 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 USDT0 and LayerZero matters. USDT0 is Tether's omnichain 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 stablecoin payments are the ones who stop optimising for chain selection and start optimising 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. Ishan Pandey: Stables has partnerships with Mastercard, Circle, Marqeta, and Coins.ph, and is now expanding into the UAE through Hub71. 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? Ishan Pandey: Stables has partnerships with Mastercard, Circle, Marqeta, and Coins.ph, and is now expanding into the UAE through Hub71. 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 Bilotta: The convergence is already happening, and it's happening faster than most people in traditional finance realise. The question isn't whether fiat and stablecoin rails will merge. It's who builds the connective tissue between them. Bernardo Bilotta: Our partnership ecosystem reflects that conviction. We've built relationships across both traditional payment networks and the stablecoin-native ecosystem because the infrastructure needs to bridge both worlds. The UAE expansion through Hub71 is strategic. The Middle East is moving faster than almost any other region on regulatory clarity for digital assets, and Dubai in particular is becoming a hub for stablecoin 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 us rather than a barrier. Because so few banks are willing to work with stablecoins, 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. Ishan Pandey: Given that USDT dominates stablecoin 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? Ishan Pandey: Given that USDT dominates stablecoin 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 Bilotta: Deliberate. Completely deliberate. Bernardo Bilotta: We are USDT-native by design, not by default. Every partnership in our stack is USDT-aligned. Our integration with USDT0 and LayerZero. Our liquidity partnerships with Mansa and t0 Network. Our institutional rails partnership with eStable, which includes local stablecoin issuing backed by USDT and Hadron. The entire architecture is built around the stablecoin that actually dominates payment flows in Asia. USDT isn't just the most popular stablecoin 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 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 stablecoin payments. We're building the infrastructure layer for that ecosystem. That's not accidental. Ishan Pandey: Stables has been described as "the Stripe for stablecoins in Asia." Is that analogy accurate and what does it get right or wrong about what you're actually building? Ishan Pandey: Stables has been described as "the Stripe for stablecoins in Asia." Is that analogy accurate and what does it get right or wrong about what you're actually building? Bernardo Bilotta: 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 stablecoin payments in Asia. One integration. Full compliance stack handled. Deep liquidity. New corridors via configuration. Bernardo Bilotta: 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 standardised 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 banks can change their stablecoin risk appetite overnight. The other thing the Stripe comparison misses is the specific bet 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 to low- and middle-income countries, are migrating from legacy rails to USDT. The serviceable addressable market for USDT-addressable flows is growing at 19% CAGR and projected to reach $340 billion by 2030. The companies that own the orchestration layer for that migration will capture disproportionate value as the market scales from millions to billions of users. So yes, we're the Stripe for stablecoins 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 annualised TPV today, we're EBITDA positive, 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!

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Stables CEO: Asia Drives 60% of Global Stablecoin Flows and Has Zero Licensed Orchestration Platform

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