Stablecoin interest among Asian businesses has moved well past awareness, but most firms are still evaluating rather than transacting, according to a survey of 150 businesses in Singapore, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Indonesia and Vietnam.
The survey, The Cost of Getting Paid , was published by Morph and Studio by Informa TechTarget. Eighty-six per cent of respondents said they understood stablecoins at least at a basic level.
Of the 149 respondents who had heard of stablecoins, 10% were already using them for business transactions or payouts and 8% were implementing them. The largest group, 38%, was evaluating stablecoins for use in the next 12 to 24 months, and another 26% said they might evaluate them in roughly the next year. The holdouts are a small group, but their reasons are telling. Of the 23 respondents not interested, 74% were waiting for the market to mature, 61% saw stablecoins as unreliable or financially risky and 48% did not know of a reliable provider.
No Indonesian or Vietnamese respondent reported using stablecoins, so the 15 live users sit in the other three markets, though 83% of Indonesians implementing or considering them expected lower cost leakage and faster access to capital.
Fees and foreign exchange markups are the most common cross-border payment problem for small Asian businesses, but few have turned to stablecoins, according to a survey from Morph. 79% of respondents named high transaction fees and FX markups as a problem in cross-border payments. Eighty-three percent said international invoice payments typically took at least two business days to reach their local bank account, and 65% estimated that fees and FX took at least 3% of their international earnings.
The delays carried a financing cost. 37% had used credit lines, overdrafts or loans to bridge cash-flow gaps caused by payment delays, according to Morph's blog, and more than half had postponed an investment or growth plan.
94% said an alternative payment option would be extremely or somewhat valuable as a backup. That measures how valuable respondents rated a fallback route, not how many want to move away from banks, and Morph's release says the report does not make the case for replacing them.
Expectations are specific. Among the 123 respondents using or considering stablecoins, 88% expected lower FX markups, hidden fees and cost leakage, 88% expected faster, round-the-clock access to capital, and 87% expected better real-time payment tracking.
What would make businesses adopt is less about the asset than the plumbing around it. Among 126 respondents asked which features affect their confidence, 96% gave regulatory compliance a very high impact. Instant off-ramping into a local bank account followed at 74%, and 1:1 parity with the respondent's own local currency at 71%. That last figure points to demand for stablecoins that track the Singapore dollar, peso, rupiah or dong, not only the US dollar.
Renna Ba, Morph's director of operations, said the finding is a demand for fewer surprises between a payment being sent and the money becoming usable, and that the operating experience around the technology will decide adoption.
The gap between interest and use shows up elsewhere. Visa's survey of 14,250 consumers found 66% aware of stablecoins and 46% likely to use them within five years, against 16% who had used them in the past year, and only 6% who understood how they work, as we reported last month .
The markets also sit in different policy positions. A Hashed and SCBX report, covered in The Bank Balance Sheet Is Now Southeast Asia's Tokenization Bottleneck , put Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines in a defensive posture, working to bring informal dollar-crypto use inside a regulatory perimeter, with the Philippines examining stablecoins for close to $35 billion of annual remittances.
Hong Kong's emphasis on 1:1 fiat parity maps to what its licensing regime requires. Licensed issuers must hold reserves of at least 100% of circulation and redeem at par, covered in an Anchorpoint piece and in an earlier piece arguing that Hong Kong's stablecoin revolution would be whitelisted .
Morph's report argues that the product promise can be regional but the proof must be local. The report's conclusion, that adoption will be won in the operating layer, matches what Morph is building .
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