Reap co-founder Daren Guo says Asia’s lead in stablecoins starts with infrastructure built for cross-border money movement. On Bits to Bricks, Guo traced how Reap went from a Hong Kong corporate card and expense company to a stablecoin card issuer moving roughly $6 billion a year — and why it moved stablecoin treasury management primarily to Solana in 2025.
“If you try to move money from, let's say, Southeast Asia to the US, it's faster if you take a boatload of cash, fly it into a plane, and then bring it to the US versus sending it through existing fiat rails.” – Daren Guo
Asia was built for international flows
Guo’s case for Asia starts with the region’s default relationship to currency. In the US, “multi-currency” often means dollars, pounds, and euros; in Asia, Guo said, fiat infrastructure commonly spans upwards of fourteen currencies, with bank accounts able to hold currencies such as Canadian dollars, Korean won, and Japanese yen.
That creates second-order effects for both business-to-business and consumer payments:
- Companies and consumers already manage foreign exchange and remittances across many currencies.
- Stablecoins add speed and programmability on top of money movement systems that were already designed for international flows.
- Hong Kong’s Asia dollar history, in Guo’s telling, shows that Reap is building on decades-old regional capabilities rather than inventing a new cross-border model from scratch.
Regulation is also moving in the same direction. Hong Kong’s Stablecoins Ordinance took effect in August 2025, with the first HKMA licenses expected in early 2026, while the Monetary Authority of Singapore finalized its “MAS-regulated stablecoin” framework in 2023.
Trade routes drive the demand
Reap focuses on Asia because the region sits at the center of business-to-business trade flows, invoice factoring, and supplier payments behind global commerce. Guo said that position matters especially for emerging markets in Africa and Latin America, where stablecoin adoption is growing quickly.
Rather than chase Asia’s end customers directly, Reap exports the infrastructure Asia provides into those markets. The pain point is sharper outside North America and Europe, where basic financial access can be less available.
“We're sometimes providing cards through our partners to individuals for the very first time ever” – Daren Guo
Reap’s B2B Stablecoin Payment report put numbers behind that shift. Business-to-business stablecoin flows rose from under $100 million a month in early 2023 to more than $3 billion by 2025, a thirtyfold increase in two years, according to Reap’s B2B Stablecoin Payment report. The report also identified Asia as the largest region for stablecoin flows, at $12.5 trillion in 2025, with the Singapore-to-China corridor as the busiest route.
Guo does not frame this as Asia dethroning the dollar. He said the US dollar remains the world’s reserve currency, used in roughly half of global commerce, and that about 83% of remittances either start or end in the US. His argument is narrower: The dollar wins on demand, while Asia is where the rails for moving dollar stablecoins are maturing first.
Reap’s reluctant path to stablecoins
Guo was an early Stripe employee and the first person on its growth team, moving to Asia in 2015 to help launch across Hong Kong, Singapore, and China. In 2018, he co-founded Reap in Hong Kong as a corporate card and expense company with a strategic bet on digitizing Asia’s cross-border strengths.
At first, the model was difficult. Guo said banks would not move, and attempts to improve speed and cost often stalled with partners that were not ready. Stablecoins eventually changed that, but slowly.
According to Guo, stablecoins only moved into the mainstream over the last twelve to eighteen months. Before that, Reap spent years educating card networks, banking partners, and customers, while the primary stablecoin use case remained on-ramping to buy Bitcoin. The first major demand came from global enterprises moving treasury across borders, followed by neobanks that wanted to issue cards where people needed them most.
The card layer
For the user, a Reap card transaction looks like an ordinary fiat swipe. Underneath, balances and settlement can run on stablecoins.
Reap’s card model is explored further in a Mint Condition episode on Reap’s stablecoin-powered card infrastructure, where stablecoins are posted as collateral and spent against a credit line. That keeps the cards postpaid, unlike many prepaid crypto cards.
Guo’s long-term focus is the settlement layer. He wants stablecoins to run through the card settlement system — stablecoins settling with Visa, Visa settling with acquirers such as Stripe, and acquirers settling with merchants — all day, every day, with programmability.
Reap gets there by building on the acceptance networks Visa and Mastercard spent decades creating. A card that works across Europe, Australia, Asia, and the US gives platforms global reach, while stablecoins add programmable settlement beneath the familiar card experience.
Why Reap settles on Solana
Reap made that settlement goal more concrete in 2025, when it moved stablecoin treasury management primarily to Solana. A business settling tens of millions of dollars a day needs rails that remain fast and low-cost as volume grows.
Reap still runs multi-chain, holding USDC and USDT across Ethereum, Polygon, and Tron. But as payment volumes increased, Solana became Reap’s primary treasury rail, according to Crowdfund Insider’s report on Reap’s Solana treasury management.
Guo frames the larger outcome as banking without borders. Today, a Mexican neobank serves Mexico and a US neobank such as Chime serves the US. Five years out, he expects those walls to thin, making it possible for a platform to serve a global market from day one.
“That's been the biggest unlock of stablecoins,” he said.
Listen and read more
For the full discussion, listen to “The Future of Cross-Border Finance with Daren Guo, co-founder of Reap Global” on Bits to Bricks.