May 08, 2026
By Joe Pan
Money20/20 Asia in Bangkok may go down as the moment the crypto industry finally admits it has become boring — and that this is exactly how it wins. The conference’s running joke captured the shift: the “most crypto” people are now the “least crypto,” trading token launches and DeFi carnival games for licenses, settlement rails and cross-border plumbing.
The euphoric Web3 narratives have receded, replaced by an infrastructure-first, utility-obsessed mindset. What remains after the Web3 tide pulls back is a cohort of builders quietly laying financial pipes inside existing systems, suggesting the crypto revolution may not be happening from the outside in, but from the inside out. In that sense, stablecoins increasingly look less like a rebellion against finance than a Trojan horse for upgrading it from within.
The stablecoin Trojan horse
Money20/20 Asia is a business-to-business fintech conference, not a crypto revival tent. Yet stablecoin and crypto-native firms accounted for roughly one-third of exhibitors, and a new “Intersection” stage openly branded itself as the meeting point of traditional finance and decentralized finance.
The striking part was that almost none of these companies were selling crypto as an ideology. Firms such as Algorand, Binance, Bitkub, BVNK, Canton Foundation, Circle, Fireblocks, OSL and Ripple were pitching payment links, settlement channels and asset custody, often describing themselves as “Web 2.5 finance” — one foot in crypto-native tech, one foot firmly in traditional payment infrastructure. For business buyers, the underlying chain was just plumbing; what mattered was speed, lower cost and compliance.
That is the real force behind the Trojan horse theory. Stablecoins are not storming the financial system with anti-bank rhetoric. They are slipping in by solving one high-friction problem that traditional finance still handles badly: cross-border payments. As one participant noted, domestic instant payment systems such as Brazil’s central bank built and controlled PIX can solve local transfers, but “cross-border is still without a solution.”
By focusing on utility instead of ideology, crypto operators are making themselves legible to banks, payment firms and regulators. The pitch is no longer about replacing the system, but about modernizing it — and, increasingly, advising jurisdictions and fintech firms on how to use blockchain rails without inheriting crypto’s old chaos.
Remittances as infrastructure
For emerging markets such as the Philippines, the killer use case is not yield farming but cheaper remittances. Cross-border money sent home accounts for a meaningful share of household income and national output, so shaving fees off those flows is financial infrastructure in the most literal sense.
Coins.ph CEO Wei Zhou said the Hong Kong-to-Philippines corridor alone is a $3 billion to $4 billion market with about $300 million in fees, and the goal is to compress that fee pool to $10 million to $30 million. “The goal is to sort of, you know, to reduce the friction, right, so that, you know, people that are sending the money can have, you know, more money in their pockets, right, so that they can actually spend that money, you know, back home, right,” Zhou said.
Just as important, Zhou made clear that Coins.ph does not view this as a war against existing remittance or fintech platforms. “We’re not here to replace the existing remittance players,” he said. “We’re really more like a wholesaler — we want you to incorporate this new cost base that we can deliver to your clients. If you use the Coins platform properly and lower your FX and wiring costs from, say, 60 or 80 bps to 10 or 20 bps, then your own product becomes more competitive.” It is a telling admission for the broader thesis: the most durable crypto businesses increasingly want to be partners, infrastructure providers and policy translators, not insurgents.
Policy as product
That same logic extends from fintech partnerships to regulation. Zhou argued that the most effective financial hubs — such as Singapore and, increasingly, the United States — start by deciding what kind of market they want to build and then shape rules around that goal.
He praised Singapore for knowing what it wants and for building a digital payment and stablecoin regime that aligns licensed players, banks and use cases around trade, commerce and payments. In his telling, that is what an intentional ecosystem looks like. Hong Kong, by contrast, still looks fragmented.
“First of all, you have to know what you want,” Zhou said. “That’s the biggest challenge. And that’s the challenge that I see in Hong Kong, because I find that the regulators don’t know what they want — like, in five years, which industries do you want to see thriving? And then we work backwards and basically frame it in a way such that we have an ecosystem of that.”
He made the problem more concrete when discussing licensing. “In Hong Kong, you basically have to negotiate like HKMA rules on stablecoins, SFC rules on trading, and then customs rules on money, right?” Zhou said. “You sort of have to navigate three rules to be able to provide that single point of exchange.” For builders trying to turn stablecoin rails into usable products, policy is not background noise. It is part of the product itself.
The geopolitical race
If remittances are the ground war, regulation is the air war. Evan Auyeung, president of Animoca Brands, argued that stablecoin regulation is no longer a niche technical issue but a strategic question for U.S. competitiveness. (Read the full article on Intel from Semafor and Washington DC.)
He warned that Washington has only a narrow window to act. “If we don’t make it in the next few months, it might be a few years before we get the same level of support again,” Auyeung said. He also pointed to the fading predictability of U.S. policy. “One thing that is very clear and both parties feel is the disappearance of the so-called ‘American certainty’ — that is, the predictability of the U.S. in geopolitics, and whether U.S. companies can still make long-term plans amid so much uncertainty,” he said.
That uncertainty matters well beyond Washington. “If the U.S. ‘eases up on the gas’ on not passing a regulatory clarity bill and not setting up market structure, what does that mean for the U.S. when Hong Kong has its own stablecoin bill, actively promotes Web3, plus the actions of other jurisdictions like the UAE?” Auyeung said. The implication is hard to miss: jurisdictions that can offer regulatory clarity and operational partners may capture the next wave of stablecoin infrastructure before the United States decides what game it is playing.
After the channels
The legacy of the Web3 retreat is financial infrastructure. The decentralized carnival of DeFi Summer has given way to channels, licenses, treasury flows and settlement partnerships. That sounds less romantic than the old crypto story, but it may prove much more durable.
With the rails increasingly in place, the question shifts from whether stablecoins work to who captures the value built on top of them. The new winners may not be the loudest token evangelists but the firms that can package blockchain infrastructure into products that regulators can tolerate, fintech platforms can adopt and enterprises can actually use.
That is why the “least crypto” turn matters. The Trojan horse only works if nobody feels attacked. In 2026, the savviest operators seem to understand that the path forward is not to sell crypto harder, but to make it disappear into infrastructure, policy advice and cost savings.
About the Author
Joe Pan is an editor and producer at Blockwind News. An early adopter of blockchain technology, he has covered major crypto conferences globally since 2019 and moderated Web3 events across Asia. Joe is part of the founding team of Blockwind News and teaches Asia’s first Master of Journalism course on “Covering Cryptocurrency and Blockchain” at Hong Kong Baptist University.
This article is based on a joint interview with the Finternet podcast during Money20/20 Asia in Bangkok.
