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But friction arises when they try to use their Tether, or USDT, in the local economy: to pay rent, buy property, or pay school fees. If they are official residents of Thailand with local-currency bank accounts, they can convert these 1:1 representations of the dollar on digital-asset exchanges and obtain fiat-money deposits. However, one seamless, low-cost transaction, where they spend their Tether and merchants receive Thai baht isn’t allowed under current regulations.

It’s only a matter of time before authorities across Southeast Asia allow crypto firms to also act as regular payment-service providers — no different from a local bank or fintech app. The view that tokens that mimic the dollar are just a gateway to crypto trading is now outdated. In the Philippines, regulators have given Coins.ph — a crypto exchange -- all the licenses to help bring down remittance costs for the vast diaspora of overseas Filipino workers. Coins.ph saw a 60%-plus jump in stablecoin deposits last year and a near-quadrupling of fiat-currency transections.

China and India will continue to resist dollar coins, though Beijing will be pragmatic and let Hong Kong develop a regulated market in them. Southeast Asia will adopt a different strategy. It will take its cue from Singapore and settle on a model in which tokens are embedded in the mainstream financial system — but with guardrails to protect customers’ funds and prevent money-laundering.

Vietnam will adopt stablecoins to make overseas trade less expensive for its increasingly competitive manufacturers. Thailand and Indonesia will want local merchants to get the most out of foreigners, without driving their usage underground. “For the large overseas population that lives in Phuket, Bali and other places, the preferred currency of transactions is dollar stablecoins,” Wei Zhou, the chief executive officer of Coins.ph, told me last week on the sidelines of Consensus, Hong Kong’s annual digital-asset conference. “That’s a huge grey market you probably don’t see or know of.”

The passage of the Genius Act in the US has sent out a powerful signal: It’s time to turn grey to green. Regulated dollar coins are now a legitimate financial product for Wall Street. Some of the world’s largest remittance corridors — US-Mexico and US-Philippines — will see costs fall as apps like Bitso Business and Coins.ph harness blockchain technology for faster settlement and reconciliation.

Ditto for commerce. Starting in the 16th century, much of the large quantities of silver mined in Spain’s American colonies was used in tokens minted privately under royal licenses. The principal use of that era’s stablecoins was to pay for trade with Ming- and Qing-dynasty China and the Mughal empire in India. Now, when more than 40% of Mexico’s imports are again from Asia — with China, Taiwan, Japan, and Malaysia as top suppliers — the settlement currency is the dollar, and a tokenized version is the most cost-efficient way for small firms to access it.

Stablecoins enable same-day execution. Working capital is unlocked immediately rather than waiting days for settlement. Reap, a Hong Kong-based stablecoin payments firm, is using Mexico as the beachhead for expansion in Latin America.

Traditional financial institutions’ profits from navigating cross-border flows over an inefficient correspondent-banking network will shrink. But banks will do other remunerative things with the technology: like offering crypto-backed loans to their wealthy clients, or competing with asset managers like Franklin Templeton in offering tokenized money-market funds to retail investors.

They will also help firms squeeze the most juice out of idle liquidity on their balance sheet, trading assets on the blockchain 24/7. “The corporate treasurers’ ‘follow-the-sun’ model is no longer bound by the working hours of intermediaries or markets,” says Myles Harrison, the chief product officer at AMINA Bank, a crypto-focused Swiss institution, which also has licenses in Hong Kong and Abu Dhabi, plus access to Europe’s regulatory regime via Austria. “We're seeing a lot more traditional corporate clients beginning to use stablecoins alongside blockchain companies.”

For individuals and very small firms, there are other practical benefits. Early-stage founders end up putting business expenses like cloud storage and software subscriptions on personal cards. But relying on informal workarounds can quickly turn “messy, expensive, and risky from a governance standpoint,” said Daren Guo, cofounder of Reap. For firms with limited access to traditional financial rails, Reap’s Visa corporate cards enable fiat-currency purchases while settlements can be funded using stablecoins.

For a region plugged into global commerce for prosperity, currency sovereignty is probably best preserved by following the template of India’s erstwhile Mughal rulers: They reminted the silver coins coming in via trade under their own seal for use as local legal tender. A modern equivalent will be to issue central-bank digital currencies against stablecoins inflows. Now that the crypto wave has landed on the shores of Phuket and Bali, the liquidity of digital dollars can’t be kept out of traditional payment systems for too long.