TL;DR
- Reap was one of the first fintechs in Asia to build on USDC for card payments, at a point the conversation frames as being "not that obvious" at the time.
- Reap's founder, Daren, argues Asia's fragmentation and weaker cross-border rails are exactly what make the region "fertile ground" for stablecoins, not an obstacle to them.
- Circle's Yam Ki Chan puts the whole stablecoin market at "a couple hundred billion" today, with Circle's own USDC around $78 billion, against money measured "in the tens of trillions."
- On regulations: the GENIUS Act (US), the Stablecoin Ordinance (Hong Kong), the Payment Services Act (Japan) and MiCA (Europe), has moved institutions from "dabbling" at the edge to integrating with Circle directly, per Yam Ki.
- Both see the next wave in programmable and agentic payments, plus use cases like payroll streaming ("the ability to be paid every second") and nano-payments ("one millionth of a penny").
What we took away
The following is Reap's editorial framing of the conversation above. Figures and claims are attributed to the speaker who made them. Recorded April 2025.
1. Reap justified USDC on the workflow it made cheaper.
Reap's co-founder Daren grounds the USDC decision in a concrete job: letting an everyday small business pay for goods and services faster and more cheaply. Connecting USDC to a card was, in his words, the "proof point." That test still applies in 2026. A business evaluating stablecoin payments should be able to name the workflow that gets faster or cheaper, and price the difference.
2. Asia's fragmented cross-border rails are what create the opening for stablecoins.
Daren and Circle's Yam Ki Chan arrive at this from opposite ends. Daren points to the absence of the strong institutions the US relies on to move money, which leaves cross-border flows slow and expensive. Yam Ki Chan calls stablecoins "internet rails for moving money," a connective layer sitting above fragmented markets. The framing moves the usual case for stablecoins away from currency instability and toward connectivity between markets.
3. Yam Ki Chan dates the institutional shift to the last 6 to 7 months.
He ties the change to four pieces of regulation landing at once: the GENIUS Act in the US, the Stablecoin Ordinance in Hong Kong, the Payment Services Act in Japan and MiCA in Europe. His own measure is time in the room. He reports more hours with bank C-levels in the last 6 to 8 months than in the two and a half years before that, moving those institutions from "the edge of the conversation" to direct integration. The competitive consequence he draws is about tier 2 and tier 3 institutions, which had been riding on larger banks and can now, in his framing, "compete on an equal level playing field."
The conversation, in context
When Reap started building on USDC for payments and card transactions, it wasn't the obvious choice it looks like today. In this conversation, Reap's founder Daren and Circle's Yam Ki Chan trace how that bet played out, and why Asia — so often described as a single monolithic market — was in fact the right place to prove that stablecoins could power everyday payments.
The throughline is a contrarian one: the region's fragmentation and complexity — the very things that make cross-border money movement hard in Asia — are what Daren and Yam Ki argue create the opening for stablecoin payments. Where legacy rails struggle to connect fragmented markets, stablecoins behave, in Yam Ki's words, like "internet rails for moving money." The two also cover the institutional shift now underway as regulation lands worldwide, and where they see stablecoin infrastructure heading next, from agentic payments to payroll streaming.
The full transcript follows, lightly edited for readability.
Full transcript
Interviewer: What's the first time you've heard of each other and what was your first impression?
Daren (Reap): I mean, I think we've known the Circle team for a very long time, and this was very much before stablecoins became super mainstream and it's now powering a lot of the global financial ecosystem. And I think it really started at the regulatory level, sort of having continuous conversations with regulators both in Asia and the US. And that obviously came to a pretty interesting experience at F1 where we really got to know each other in a very intimate level, and it's really cascaded and proliferated from there where we are now very, very close partners across a myriad of different products that we do and continue thinking about Circle very closely even as we expand across product lines, across geographic boundaries. And I think this partnership will continue to form. And Yam Ki has been a great sort of almost mentor for me in terms of how he leads and how Yam Ki thinks about the world especially as it relates to stablecoins, so it's been an incredible relationship for myself personally but obviously from a Reap perspective as well.
Yam Ki Chan (Circle): Awfully gracious of you. I've known of Reap — we've had a relationship with Circle before I even joined Circle. And as someone that's from Hong Kong I'm obviously drawn to businesses and things they're building in the city, and you were one of the leaders for that. But to me, partnerships and relationships are not moments in time, especially here in Asia. It's really around the endurance, the time spent together, joined through not only a nautical deal but also challenging times together. And what I've found is that the Reap team has always been very mission driven — how do you solve problems, what can we do, how do you help. And then at the executive level, just spending time together. I mean you mentioned F1 — I think even by then we had been seeing each other quite a bit in different ways, but that was a more intentional time to be centred and talking through different things as we're spending time watching the...
Daren (Reap): Seminal moment for me for sure. The car going around and around.
Yam Ki Chan (Circle): But I think to me it's what I've really admired about you and about the Reap team — is that you're serious about what you do. It's not like other sort of crypto companies that are just there for the moment. You've been in the payments business for a very long time, and then you brought on the use of stablecoins, and then you've been rebuilding your entire platform on that. And to be able to lead the team through that was really amazing. And I remember coming to your office in Hong Kong when you guys were opening your new Hong Kong office — seven years — and it was a really big deal, and I'm really, really happy to be part of that.
Why Reap built on USDC when it wasn't obvious
Interviewer: So you were one of the first fintechs in Asia to build on USDC for payments, for card transactions. At the time it wasn't that obvious — what made you believe stablecoins like USDC was right for Reap?
Daren (Reap): Yeah, I think there's a couple of different things. I think one starts with the customer. Hong Kong, Asia — unlike other paradigm-shifting technologies — has an important pioneering role to play within stablecoins and crypto, and it has always had that role. So there's a lot of talent, capital, that's demanding better financial service access, and stablecoins was very much the best version of that compared to legacy financial providers. And then if you combine that with the fact that financial services has not evolved and been enhanced at a fundamental level for decades, the demand from the customers as well as from a first-principles perspective on how the world should work, I think that combination made it very obvious that stablecoins, USDC was going to be a critical part of what financial services in the next evolution looked like.
Now, I think the role for Reap was to find a proof point so that the layman, the everyday small business, could fundamentally understand the benefits and the utility of stablecoins. So being able to connect that to a card, to payment rails, so that they can actually pay for goods and services, experience the speed and cost benefits of stablecoins — that was I think the first hurdle of many that we needed to sort of prove out.
I think the second thing is the fact that Asia is very much different than other developed markets where it's been built for international companies, and because of that the complexities of cross-border payments, the complexities of not having strong financial institutions like the US to facilitate money movement — that has always been a challenge. So from that perspective, we needed something that was more fluid, that enabled more financial flows to be happening at internet speeds. And that's where I think stablecoins and the problems that are associated with Asia — and the role that Asia has as it relates to international trade and commerce — made it very obvious as a fertile ground for stablecoins and stablecoin-backed card and payments to really proliferate. And that's where we were very confident in working with stablecoins and USDC specifically.
Why Asia's fragmentation favors stablecoin rails
Yam Ki Chan (Circle): Yeah, in many ways when you think of the challenge for Asia, people use the social security in the US and they talk about Asia as a giant monolithic place. But the challenge of Asia is the fragmentation and the complexity — but therein lies the opportunity for stablecoins, that it is essentially internet rails for moving money on the internet. And I think that has really brought the broader region together to be able to transact cross-border in a very meaningful way.
Interviewer: So let's bring this back to Reap and Circle. From Circle's side, what was it that you saw in Reap early on that made them stand out? And now that the stablecoin journey and the USDC journey has grown quite a bit — you guys are a public company, global issuer — at this stage, what kind of new use cases are you guys excited about for USDC adoption and how do you bring that to new heights?
Yam Ki Chan (Circle): Let me start with the first part of the question — what made Reap stand out. First and foremost, we're looking for companies that are providing real utility to the marketplace. And you were already in the payments business, you were already a principal credit issuer, you were already working with a number of small and medium enterprises as well as some of the larger ones to help them make payments easier. Then the question became, where does USDC fit into your infrastructure to make your operations better, and then how does that help you expand and build your business and create additional value — not just for you but really for your customers. And the stablecoin cards, the ability to have top-ups using stablecoins like USDC, was a huge game changer for you, and also helping you to move your treasury management and be able to offer that to some of your partners as well.
And that's one of the other pieces around the builders — it's easy to have an idea, it's much harder to actually go and build it out and then do the reps. And you and your team really did that. And that was really good to see. And we were learning together — we were trying to figure things out, like how does the money move on a fee basis, how does it actually get minted, where do you send it on. We started with USDC, we looked at USYC, the tokenised money market fund, all these other things — it's easier when you have a partner that has gone through the journey, understands the benefits of blockchain, understands how you work with us and how we work with you, and then has the compliance mindset to really grow the business.
So those are a couple of things. In terms of what's next — we are just getting started. And not just Circle and Reap but we as an industry are still so early. When you think about the size of the stablecoin market, it's a couple hundred billion — we're about $78 billion today — but money is in the tens of trillions. So when you think of money moving onto the blockchain, it's just early. When you look at tokenised money market funds, USYC is the largest tokenised money market fund at around $3 billion today, but the tokenised money market fund market is $8 trillion — again, just getting started.
The institutional shift: GENIUS Act, HK Stablecoin Ordinance, MiCA
Yam Ki Chan (Circle): So what's next? A couple of things. One is the passage of the GENIUS Act in the United States, the Stablecoin Ordinance in Hong Kong, the Payment Services Act in Japan, MiCA in Europe — this means that institutions are now coming in in a very serious way into digital assets and the blockchain platform. Before they had been dabbling, they had been at the edge of it, trying to do it from an innovation perspective. Now they're really coming onto the blockchain, integrating with us directly to bring those services not only within the bank but also to their customers. That's a real major shift that's been happening over the last 6 to 7 months.
The second piece is — we are at this amazing time where blockchain adoption is becoming mainstream and institutional, and AI is mainstream and institutional. And the part about digital money that has now been unlocked is the programmability, the agentic payment part of money, where you can have movement of money not just between two institutions but between two bots, between two entities through their bots or through their wallets, to be able to do programmatic payments. We just launched a product that allows for nano payments where you can pay and move money almost gas-free, in one millionth of a penny. So the ability to move money really like electrons on the internet will be a major game changer in terms of what new use cases will be built — not just by us but really by our partners and all the other startups and builders and developers that have yet to come online.
Daren (Reap): Yeah, it's funny — we should definitely sync on that. I think one of the use cases that we're very excited about especially in emerging markets is payroll streaming — the ability to be paid every second. The infrastructure that we have today is just fundamentally not set up to support those types of use cases. And while it may not be important for developed market consumers, I think for certain markets where it's emerging, for a certain socioeconomic class, these types of access to capital, access to funds will be life-changing for some of them. So those are the use cases that we're really excited to partner on.
What surprised them most in the last 12 to 18 months
Interviewer: Absolutely. Since the first time we met, we've gone from this little niche crypto thing to something that regulators worldwide are extremely excited about and actively legislating. What's one shift in the past 12 to 18 months that's surprised you the most?
Yam Ki Chan (Circle): Great question. The one thing that surprised me — we had expected that with legislation coming into place the institutions would come online. That was always part of the thinking. But the speed and intensity at which they're coming to us is something that I haven't experienced before in my couple of years, three years at Circle. I have spent more time with C-levels at banks, in boardrooms and management offsites, in the last 6 to 8 months than I had in the 2 and a half years before that.
It used to be this thing that was at the edge of the conversation — they were in the mix, it wasn't as if we weren't talking — but it went from "let's meet at the side of conferences" to "let me actually bring you into the most intimate part of my bank or my institution and let's figure out how we work together, how we build this thing." And for these institutions — not just the largest ones — what's really interesting is the tier 2 and tier 3 institutions that have been riding on the larger institutions are saying, "wait a minute, now we can actually compete on an equal level playing field." And that's really changing how they're thinking about it. And then of course the other piece is that institutions are now thinking about programmable payments, thinking about how they can build additional revenue sources and revenue streams that were difficult to do before because moving money was hard.
Daren (Reap): Yeah, it's super interesting. I think stablecoins more than anything else is a catalyst for change. We talk about mobile driving a different user experience for consumers everywhere, but financial services remained largely the same — especially in emerging markets. And I think stablecoins are catalysing this shift to be more digital, faster, especially in emerging markets where people are almost like recognising problems that they've always had but have been hidden beneath the surface. But now, because everyone's talking about stablecoins in this way, they're rethinking from first principles exactly how financial services should work.
Yam Ki Chan (Circle): You know, in our industry, in fintech, people have talked about the unbanked and the underbanked for a very, very long time. And fundamentally the challenge was you had to go to a certain bank. Totally. And now the shackles have been taken off and you can actually integrate with different banks, different non-banks, different institutions, wallets. And we're not going to solve it overnight, but the white space to build — and how people will essentially use digital dollars and digital yen and digital Hong Kong dollars, whatever it may be, to build their business and reach their customers — that's going to shift in a pretty significant way.
Where Reap and Circle are headed together
Interviewer: Where do you think Reap and Circle are headed together?
Daren (Reap): To the glory land! I think as Yam Ki mentioned, we're still very early days in the building journey. The building stack for financial services is fundamentally changing and it will continue to evolve with developments like AI and agentic payments — where things that we even take for granted, like being able to move money from point A to point B, that's a very simplistic primitive based on archaic infrastructure. That concept in of itself — as agentic comes online in even more meaningful, material ways — there's going to be a ton that stablecoin issuers and stablecoin utility players like ourselves will be able to drive those use cases forward, taking into account problems that we don't see as readily in emerging markets, in places like Latin America and Africa. Really going to understand the customers' pain points I think is going to be the first step of many to be able to build for this new financial services world.
Yam Ki Chan (Circle): There are so many things that we can work on. I mean, at a base level we started with USDC as dollar liquidity essentially in your platform. We're adding USYC — which is the yield-earning token in money markets on your platform. We can do Circle Payments Network — the ability for your customers to send funds anywhere in the world and get that paid out in stablecoins or in local fiat through various partners. And then there is the economic OS — Arc — which is the new blockchain that will be launching very soon. The ability for you to leverage that network to have interoperability across different blockchains, to build different sets of applications with privacy built in, to have instant settlement, and then to be plugged into a larger ecosystem of partners that are also building on that platform. It's like the early days of Windows opening up — you can not only build just for one operating system but really be able to connect to different databases and other things. That will be enormously fascinating. And then of course AI and agentic payments — we're just getting started as an industry.
What we took away
1. The bet was on utility, not on crypto. The recurring theme in Daren's answers is that stablecoins earned their place by solving a concrete problem — letting an everyday small business actually pay for goods and services faster and more cheaply — rather than by being a novel technology. Connecting USDC to a card was, in his words, the "proof point." For businesses evaluating stablecoin payments today, that framing still holds: the question worth asking is which real workflow gets faster or cheaper, not whether the underlying rail is novel.
2. Fragmentation is the feature, not the bug. Both speakers land on the same idea from different directions: Asia's lack of unified, low-friction cross-border rails is precisely what makes stablecoins useful there. Yam Ki's "internet rails for moving money" captures it. This reframes a common assumption — that stablecoins are mainly a workaround for unstable currencies — toward a broader case about connecting fragmented markets.
3. The institutional phase looks different from the retail one. Yam Ki's most concrete claim is about tempo: institutions moved from "the edge of the conversation" to direct integration in a matter of months, which he ties to regulation landing across the US, Hong Kong, Japan and Europe. If that holds, the interesting competitive story is among tier 2 and tier 3 institutions that can now, in his framing, "compete on an equal level playing field."
4. The forward-looking use cases are still early. Payroll streaming and nano-payments are presented as possibilities the current infrastructure "is just fundamentally not set up to support," not shipping products. We'd treat them as a direction of travel rather than available capability, and the emerging-markets framing Daren gives them is worth watching rather than banking on.
