Stablecoins as a settlement layer: Darren Wang on cross- border payments

Darren Wang, Founder and CEO of Owlting Group, explains how stablecoins can make cross-border payments faster, more predictable and less capital-intensive by serving as the settlement layer between local currencies.

For readers who may not know Owlting, how would you describe the company and the problem in payments that you set out to solve?

Owlting builds regulated infrastructure that lets businesses move money across borders, with stablecoins as the settlement layer. Our payments business, OwlPay, sits underneath remittance firms, payment service providers, and platforms. Their customers send and receive in the currencies they already use. We handle what happens in between.

The problem we set out to solve is uncertainty. Everyone says cross-border payments are slow and expensive, and they are. But a finance team can plan around slow, not with a payment that disappears into a chain of correspondent banks, arrives short because of a fee nobody mentioned, or gets held because one bank reads a compliance rule differently from the rest.

So companies protect themselves the only way they can. They pre-fund accounts in every market and leave cash sitting idle as insurance. That is capital that could be paying staff or buying inventory.

We did not set out to build a stablecoin company. We set out to make cross-border payments predictable: a known cost, a known arrival time, and a clean record. Stablecoins turned out to be the best tool we have found to deliver that.

Cross-border payments remain expensive, slow, and operationally complex, particularly for businesses operating across different currencies and jurisdictions. Which specific part of this problem is Owlting focused on solving?

We focus on the two ends of a payment, where it touches the banking system.

A stablecoin payment has three parts. Local currency comes in and is converted under a license, with proper customer checks. The stablecoin moves on-chain. Then the recipient is paid in local currency, into a local account. The middle part gets most of the attention, but it is the easy piece. A digital dollar can move between two parties in seconds, with a final and visible record. The first and last parts sit inside regulated banking systems, one country at a time. That is where payments break and where we work.

OwlPay Harbor is an API that runs the whole flow. A platform sends one instruction. It does not need to hold private keys, use an exchange, or build a compliance team for every corridor. Harbor has now settled payments into more than 50 destination markets.

Oneremit is a good example. It serves Nigerian businesses paying suppliers abroad, and much of what it moves is trade with China. On routes that used to take three to five days, payments through Harbor now settle in under 24 hours. For an importer, that means a supplier who ships the next order sooner.

Demand is growing quickly. Harbor's payment volume nearly tripled month over month in August. Across fiat and stablecoin, OwlPay has processed more than USD 700 million in cumulative volume, and we are aiming for USD 1 billion by the end of 2026.

The stablecoin and payments infrastructure market now includes very large and well-funded companies, particularly in the US and Europe. Where does Owlting believe it can compete effectively against these larger players?

Capital buys speed in engineering and distribution. It buys much less speed in licensing, and even less in convincing a local bank to accept money that has touched a blockchain. Regulators work to their own timetable. Banking relationships are built one institution and one corridor at a time.

That makes time a real advantage. We started building our licensing and banking base years before stablecoins had broad institutional acceptance, when the business case was still uncertain.

Today we hold 42 US money transmitter licenses and a Bank API license in Japan, and SBI Holdings is our largest institutional shareholder.

The second point is where we choose to sit. I do not expect stablecoin payments to have a single winner. We decided early to be the licensed layer underneath other companies: remittance firms, payment service providers, platforms, and fintechs that want stablecoin settlement without spending years on licenses and bank relationships. That makes many large players partners rather than rivals. When Circle launched the Arc public mainnet on September 16, OwlPay went live as a launch partner.

Bloxcross shows how the model works. It serves Latin American importers paying suppliers in Asia, businesses that traditional banks often underserve. Bloxcross owns the client relationship. We connect the fiat and digital asset sides underneath, supporting its payments across 48 countries.

In the end, this market is decided in details few people see: how many corridors pay out on time, how cleanly each transaction reconciles, and whether compliance holds up when an examiner looks closely.

How does building a payments business from Asia shape your approach differently from companies that have emerged from the US or European financial markets? Are there lessons from Asian markets that you think are still underestimated elsewhere?

Building from Asia means you never get to assume a single market. There is no common currency, no payment scheme with the reach of SEPA, and no shared regulatory template. A US company can grow large before foreign exchange becomes its problem. A European company inherits the euro. We had to design for many currencies, regulators, and banking cultures from day one.

That shows in our flows. More than 60% of OwlPay's cross-border volume settles into Asia, with Greater China the largest destination. It is where trade happens, and where the need to pay suppliers quickly is sharpest.

Two lessons from this environment are still underestimated elsewhere.

First, businesses want local currency, not tokens. Their payroll, taxes, and suppliers are all local. A payment that lands as a token they have to convert has simply moved the work to their desk.

For them, local payout is the product.

Second, compliance sets the speed. A payment is only as fast as its slowest compliance check. If a transfer settles on-chain in seconds and then waits days for review at the receiving bank, it is not a fast payment. Compliance has to travel with the transaction, so the receiving institution sees what it needs before the money arrives.

Owlting has been pursuing expansion into markets including the US and Europe, where licensing and regulatory requirements can be substantially different from those in Asia. What do you see as the biggest regulatory or operational challenges in entering these markets?

The challenges in the two regions are different from our view.

In the US, getting a state license is the start. Each state has its own examinations, reporting, and capital or bonding requirements, and they continue for as long as you hold the license. Across 42 licenses, that becomes a permanent operating discipline. The banking relationships underneath need the same care.

In Europe, MiCA's single rulebook is a real step forward. But a single rulebook is not a single banking market. Local payout still depends on banks in each country being willing to handle flows that touch digital assets, and that willingness varies more than the regulation does.

So in Europe we grow through our network. We work with licensed payment partners that already hold local permissions and bank access, and we keep adding corridors and payout routes with them. Europe already has more Harbor destination markets than any other region. In parallel, we are working through our own licensing path under the MiCA framework.

The principle is the same everywhere. We would rather add a corridor slowly than add one we cannot fully defend to a regulator or a banking partner.

What needs to happen for stablecoins to move from being primarily a crypto-industry technology to becoming a more broadly used payment rail for businesses and financial institutions?

Stablecoins will become a mainstream payment rail when finance teams stop noticing them. Much of the industry still sells the technology: chains, throughput, programmability. Corporate treasurers buy outcomes. They want a known cost, a known arrival time, and a transaction that fits their existing systems and passes an audit. The gap between those two conversations is the main reason adoption has lagged the technology.

Closing that gap takes three things. The first is regulatory clarity beyond issuers. Most of the debate has been about reserves and who may issue a stablecoin. Businesses also need clear rules for the licensed companies that move stablecoins for them, because those are the firms they actually sign contracts with.

The second is on- and off-ramp capacity connected to local banks. A stablecoin is only useful if it can become the currency the recipient needs. The third is hiding the complexity. A business should never have to manage wallet addresses or network fees.

We saw what that looks like this summer. At its AIDS 2026 conference in Rio de Janeiro, the International AIDS Society paid about 900 scholarship recipients, volunteers, and program participants from 95 countries. The society sent us one funding instruction. We converted and settled the funds, and Decaf's wallet let each person spend, withdraw, or send the money home.

For many recipients, it was their first digital wallet. The backup cash the society brought was never used.

As software agents begin to make payments for businesses, settlement that carries its compliance with it will matter even more.

How do you see stablecoin adoption developing in Asia compared with the US and Europe? Are there meaningful differences in how businesses, banks and regulators in these regions approach the technology?

The biggest difference is how well the existing rails already work.

For businesses, the value of stablecoin settlement grows where current options fall short. Inside Europe, instant payments and the euro area already cover most needs, so stablecoins help most at the edges, where money enters or leaves the region. Asia has no regional foundation like that. The friction is felt every day, which is why so much of our volume goes there.

Regulators show a similar split. In Europe, regulation moved ahead of demand: MiCA gave the market a full framework before business use reached scale. In much of Asia, demand has moved ahead of regional harmonisation. Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan have each built their own stablecoin rules, but they do not yet connect. In the US, the GENIUS Act settled who can issue a payment stablecoin, and activity has concentrated in issuance, custody, and capital markets.

In the US and Japan, banks tend to start with custody and issuance and work toward payments. In Asia's trade corridors, payment firms and their business customers usually move first, and banks follow once the flows are proven.

That brings me back to where I started. Businesses are not asking for stablecoins, but asking for payments that arrive when expected, at a known cost. Where that need is sharpest, adoption will move first.

About author

Darren Wang is the Founder and CEO of Owlting Group (Nasdaq: OWLS), which he founded in 2010 and listed in 2025. He builds regulated cross-border payment infrastructure through OwlPay, the company's fiat and stablecoin hybrid payment platform. A cryptography expert with more than 20 years as an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley and Taiwan, he holds an M.S.E.E. from Boston University and completed Harvard Business School's Owner/President Management Program.

 

About Owlting

Owlting Group is the operating brand of OBOOK Holdings Inc. (Nasdaq: OWLS), a fintech company founded in Taiwan that builds regulated payment infrastructure. Its core business is OwlPay, a fiat and stablecoin hybrid payment platform. Owlting holds 42 US money transmitter licenses and an Electronic Payment Intermediary Service Provider (Bank API) license in Japan.