Singapore Is Growing as Crypto Becomes Infrastructure

Singapore’s crypto economy is moving in a different direction from much of the region. While the broader Central and Southeast Asia and Oceania (CSAO) crypto economy contracted 6.8% in the year through June 2026, Singapore’s activity jumped 55.4% to $284 billion, making it the region’s largest measured crypto economy, according to Chainalysis.

The numbers point to a market increasingly shaped by institutions rather than a fresh wave of retail speculation. Institutional-platform activity in Singapore surged 94% to $60 billion, with much of that volume concentrated among market makers, over-the-counter trading firms and institutional brokerages. Chainalysis said the growth was driven largely by high-volume activity from existing platforms rather than a flood of new services entering the market.

But Singapore’s expansion was not limited to institutional desks. Chainalysis said centralized-exchange flows increased 30% while decentralized-exchange flows climbed 69%, suggesting that the city-state’s crypto economy is expanding across several layers of the market at the same time. That matters because it makes the 55.4% jump look less like a single institutional trading spike and more like a broader shift in how digital assets are being integrated into Singapore’s financial system.

That shift is unfolding alongside a regulatory strategy designed to push digital assets toward more controlled financial use cases. Singapore has tightened oversight of crypto firms while simultaneously developing infrastructure around tokenization, regulated stablecoins and digital-asset settlement. MAS’ BLOOM initiative, for example, is designed to support settlement using tokenized commercial bank money and regulated stablecoins across domestic and cross-border transactions.

Ripple joined BLOOM in March to work with trade-finance infrastructure provider Unloq on a cross-border settlement pilot using Ripple USD, or RLUSD, alongside tokenized bank liabilities. The project is aimed at using programmable settlement infrastructure to release payments when predefined trade conditions are met, giving Singapore’s crypto push a decidedly different character from the speculative trading cycles that have dominated much of the industry’s history.

The Regulatory Squeeze May Be Part of the Story

Singapore’s rise also comes after a period in which regulators deliberately raised the bar for crypto businesses. In 2025, MAS moved to tighten the rules surrounding digital-token service providers serving customers outside Singapore, part of a broader effort to bring the sector under closer regulatory supervision.

The result, according to StraitsX CEO Tianwei Liu, has been a market with less speculative activity and a greater presence of banks, large companies and other institutional participants using blockchain in production. That interpretation fits the broader Chainalysis data, which shows Singapore’s institutional-platform activity growing much faster than the rest of the CSAO region.

The institutionalization of Singapore’s market is also visible in the infrastructure being built around stablecoins. MAS is continuing to refine its stablecoin framework, including proposed rules for certain jointly issued stablecoins and recognition of some foreign-issued stablecoins for cross-border wholesale use cases. MAS said the goal is to provide regulatory guardrails while allowing stablecoins to function as settlement assets in tokenized financial markets.

Singapore’s regulatory approach therefore creates an unusual combination: stricter rules for crypto businesses alongside greater experimentation with blockchain-based financial infrastructure. Rather than simply trying to make crypto bigger, the country appears increasingly focused on making parts of the technology usable inside the existing financial system.

Southeast Asia’s Other Crypto Story Is Happening on the Ground

That is where the story gets more interesting. While Singapore’s growth is increasingly tied to institutional finance and settlement infrastructure, the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are showing a different form of crypto adoption — one that is much closer to everyday money movement.

The three countries recorded a combined 5.4 million small-value P2P transfers below $10,000 during the year through June 2026. Those transfers represented 14.4% of the global total despite the three markets accounting for only 2.5% of the global crypto economy, according to Chainalysis. More than 80% of domestic P2P transfers were below $1,000, with an average transaction size of $618 compared with $1,210 globally.

The Philippines provides perhaps the clearest example of why those smaller transactions matter. Personal remittances received by the country were equivalent to 8.5% of GDP in 2025, according to World Bank data, creating a large financial corridor where faster and cheaper digital settlement can have practical consequences beyond crypto trading.

PDAX CEO Nichel Gaba estimated that between 5% and 10% of inbound remittances are now settled using stablecoins, while major remittance companies are exploring stablecoin settlement. In July, the Bank of the Philippine Islands announced its own stablecoin settlement initiative with Meridian, targeting cross-border payment flows including payroll credits for freelancers, virtual assistants and other workers in the informal economy.

Vietnam presents another version of the same trend. P2P markets can act as a bridge between local bank accounts and crypto platforms when domestic currency support is limited, helping explain why smaller-value transactions remain important even as much of the country’s crypto activity occurs through overseas exchanges.

Thailand is showing another side of the transition. Its stablecoin market reached about $10.4 billion in domestic activity, while Vietnam’s reached $6.9 billion. Yet in both markets, cross-border stablecoin activity was significantly larger than domestic activity, pointing toward a regional use case centered less on speculation and more on moving money across borders.

Stablecoins Are Becoming the Bridge Between Two Crypto Economies

The clearest regional pattern may be hiding in the stablecoin data. Chainalysis found that cross-border stablecoin activity exceeded domestic activity in every CSAO market it analyzed, with cross-border flows across the region reaching roughly 3.2 times the size of domestic activity.

That distinction helps explain why Singapore and its Southeast Asian neighbors can appear to be moving in opposite directions while actually participating in the same broader transformation. Singapore is building institutional rails for tokenized assets, regulated stablecoins and wholesale settlement, while markets such as the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam are using those same digital assets to solve problems around remittances, P2P transfers and cross-border payments.

Chainalysis pointed to ease of use, speed and lower transfer costs as plausible drivers of stablecoin adoption. The regional numbers suggest that stablecoins are increasingly becoming less about holding a digital dollar and more about using one as a piece of financial infrastructure.

That could be the bigger story behind Singapore’s 55.4% surge. The region is not simply becoming more bullish on crypto. It is developing different layers of a digital-asset economy at the same time — institutional trading and tokenization in Singapore, everyday P2P activity in emerging markets, and stablecoins connecting the two through cross-border settlement.

For Singapore, the $284 billion figure shows how quickly that institutional layer is expanding. For the rest of Southeast Asia, the millions of smaller transfers show why crypto adoption cannot be measured only by the size of trading markets.

The region’s crypto economy may be contracting on paper, but the underlying infrastructure is moving in the opposite direction. The more important question now is whether these experiments in institutional settlement, remittances and stablecoin payments can turn crypto from an asset people trade into a financial network businesses and consumers actually use.