Coins.ph CEO Wei Zhou On Stablecoin FX And Bank Liquidity

The fiat node

“What I call these fiat nodes, where stablecoins can get traded for local, local fiat currency,” Zhou said. “We hope to build more of these nodes as more emerging markets come online.”

Under the coins.xyz brand the group now operates in Thailand, Brazil, Mauritius and Australia, and Zhou says a small team in Nigeria is working toward a licence there. “These different touch points sort of sit under different regulated entities,” he said, “but then they provide a single sort of … global … stablecoin payment business.”

On June 1 it signed Clear Junction, giving it euro and sterling collection rails for corporate clients, and it claims 75% to 80% of peso-to-stablecoin liquidity, a company-reported figure. The point of stacking these pieces, Zhou said, is what they add up to. “Once we have a network of these, we can actually present a more holistic solution rather than sort of a single country or a single region. We can basically say, hey, here’s a single API.”

There is an accounting argument underneath it too. Whatever currency a client collects in, “it all comes in as USDC,” he said. “It doesn’t have, like, six different foreign currencies that we sort of take account of.”

Raj Kamal, co-founder and CEO of the stablecoin payments firm TransFi, deals with that constraint on the payout side of his own business. “The on-chain leg has to synchronize with the off-chain leg, which is the fiat part where payouts are happening,” Kamal said on the On The Margin podcast. That off-chain leg is why stablecoin settlement volume overtook ACH without displacing a single local payout network.

Above ground

Zhou dates the change to the GENIUS Act, signed in July 2025. “Since the legalization of stablecoins,” he said, flows went “from sort of below ground to basically above ground.”

The buyers changed with the law. “Not just retail,” Zhou said. “Regulated financial institutions in a lot of these countries have sort of moved in, namely banks.” American banks began targeting the stablecoin market over the same period.

Neo, chief executive of the onchain neobank UR, put a similar weight on supervision when he spoke on the On The Margin podcast. “Once the governments, the regulators take notice and start policing, that’s when things get serious,” he said. “That’s when I would say like proper companies get built, who are governed well, who are run well because in the end you do handle money.”

Owning both ends of the corridor

Most cross-border crypto firms, in his account, hand off to a local partner at the border and inherit that partner’s compliance.

“Once that money leaves the UK and touches Brazil, then that money basically then has to follow Brazil … money transmitting regulation,” Zhou said. “It’s actually better to build from the bottom up so that we know who the customers are and we know how the money flows.”

Part of his caution comes from crypto itself. “Once the money’s out, then it’s really hard to move the money back.”

Where Coins.ph holds the licence at both ends of a corridor, the transfer between them stays inside entities it controls. “You’re not relying on someone else’s sort of KYC,” Zhou said.

Who this is actually for

Philippine cash remittances hit a record $35.63 billion in 2025, about 7.3% of GDP, according to Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. The World Bank puts remittances to low- and middle-income countries at $685 billion in 2024, and the average cost of sending $200 at 6.49%.

Zhou’s estimate is that 10 to 15 million Filipinos work overseas, as nurses in Singapore and the United States, factory workers in Japan and Korea, and domestic helpers in Hong Kong and the Gulf. “You go to anywhere sort of like in Hong Kong on the weekends,” he said. “You basically see Filipino helpers, you know, taking the day off on Sundays. I just think, like, that labor force has historically been underserved and … overcharged from the fee perspective.” The channels he wants to build are “not necessarily to serve the retail audience directly, but actually to help the businesses that serve them.”

The second cohort is newer and, he thinks, growing faster. “It’s really hard for Filipino remote workers or remote businesses to get a US dollar bank account or a European bank account,” Zhou said. What that group wants, in his description, is “to sort of make money globally … but spend the local.” That gap is why Stripe and stablecoins have been rewiring remote work.

Alvin Kan, chief operating officer of Bitget Wallet, watches that customer base from the wallet side of the business. “There are two very clear distinct segments of users. I call them the crypto traders or crypto users and the stablecoin adopters,” Kan said on the On The Margin podcast. “To grow, there is a lot of people around the world who are unbanked and need stablecoins.”

The moat, and the ceiling

Zhou’s competitive claim is aimed at foreign exchange, an industry the Federal Reserve has already flagged as exposed to stablecoins. “Even the brokers, they still source FX from the banks,” he said. “The FX still sits with, like, the JP Morgan and Citibank … of the world.”

His order book swaps dollars for pesos with no correspondent bank in the chain. “For example, on the weekends, banks will close. You can’t get into FX,” Zhou said. “Whereas our exchange is open on the weekend.” The second difference he points to is where the money actually sits. “You don’t have to necessarily custody that money at a bank,” he said. “That optionality did not exist before.”

Neo has built his neobank around that combination. “It’s self-custody. The money is yours,” he said on the On The Margin podcast. “But at the same time, it’s on-chain and off-chain at the same time.”

Zhou brings up the question of market depth before it is put to him. Bank dealers quote $3 million or $10 million without moving the price. “One thing that’s unique about crypto is, once things go up to the size, price moves,” he said. He thinks matching that size is the entire test: “If we can do that in size, the same size of chunks that you can do with a bank,” then, in his words, “that is a very defensible position.” He has not yet shown it outside the Philippines.

Sami Start, co-founder of the onramp firm Transak, has a flatter read on where these businesses work. “The very boring truth is that the amount of volume and revenue that we see is pretty much just correlated by the GDP of that country,” Start said on the On The Margin podcast. A fiat node is worth roughly what its economy transacts.

Zhou, asked to sum up the goal, went back to cost. “Our mission here is actually to use these stablecoin rails to increase access,” he said, “but also, secondly, lower the cost of capital.”