[Report] ASA Report: How to Read Asia's Digital Money Market

Rather than following a single stablecoin-led path, Asia's digital money landscape is taking shape as one where CBDCs, deposit tokens, and stablecoins coexist. While the US and Europe treat public-chain stablecoins as the default form of digital money, Asia runs CBDCs and deposit tokens in parallel as core options. National-level initiatives that use a CBDC as the final settlement asset and circulate deposit tokens on top of it are also concentrated in Asia.
The strategies of the ten countries in Asia fall into three broad models. Korea, Japan, and the Philippines follow a full-layer design that brings CBDCs, deposit tokens, and stablecoins all inside the regulated system, while China, India, and Indonesia lean toward upper-layer control, reinforcing CBDCs while either blocking stablecoins or tying them to state assets. Singapore, Hong Kong, and the UAE fit an inverted pyramid model that deploys stablecoins as an export product of their financial hubs.
Asian policymakers' preference for CBDCs and deposit tokens is closely tied to a calculation aimed at protecting both monetary sovereignty and the stability of the existing financial system. The main drivers are digital dollarization, in which dollar stablecoin inflows push down the local currency and raise dollar funding costs; payment infrastructure where integrated settlement networks built around a few large banks already work; and the avoidance of institutional friction over bank deposit flight.
Policy intent and market demand do not necessarily move in the same direction. Asia-originated stablecoin payments reach $245 billion a year, or 60% of the global total. Korea posts the largest stablecoin trading volume in Asia against its local currency at about $65 billion over 12 months, yet every asset traded is USDT or USDC. In India, Vietnam, and China as well, demand is forming offshore regardless of tax measures or outright bans.
The opportunity for local-currency stablecoins lies not in becoming a global standard currency but in serving as a gateway that connects domestic currencies to dollar rails and onchain finance. This plays out across three markets: access to the dollar standard rail (XSGD, JPYC, PHPC), multi-country payments through onchain FX, and the cash leg of onchain capital markets. Deposit tokens in particular struggle to enter DeFi liquidity pools because of their legal nature as bank liabilities, making this a market only stablecoins can open.
Asia is not a single market. The region spans more than 40 countries and over half the world's population, from the world's second-largest economy to its least developed nations, with no overarching body like the EU to coordinate policy. Since the same technology plays different roles in each country, opportunities will come from understanding each market's monetary system, payment infrastructure, and regulation rather than from a broad "Asia strategy.”

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ASA Report: How to Read Asia's Digital Money Market

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