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StraitsX

Institution · Stablecoin and payments infrastructure

StraitsX is a Singapore-based stablecoin and payments-infrastructure operator, the issuer of XSGD (a Singapore-dollar-pegged stablecoin) and XUSD (a US-dollar-pegged stablecoin), and the clearest worked example of a regulated single-currency stablecoin used as a backend settlement rail for live cross-border merchant payments in Southeast Asia. The company holds Major Payment Institution (MPI) licences from the Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS), and XSGD is acknowledged by MAS as substantively compliant with its single-currency stablecoin (SCS) framework. For a tokenisation operator, StraitsX matters because it has moved past the pilot stage: its stablecoins clear real tourist and remittance flows behind familiar QR front-ends (GrabPay, Alipay+, KASIKORNBANK's Q Wallet), with Purpose Bound Money (PBM) programmability layered into the settlement leg. Together XSGD and XUSD had processed over USD 18 billion in on-chain transaction volume as of December 2025 (StraitsX, 16 December 2025).

Tokenisation positioning

StraitsX sits at the regulated end of the stablecoin design space. Rather than positioning XSGD and XUSD as speculative trading instruments, the strategy is to make them invisible settlement infrastructure underneath existing consumer wallets, with the on-chain leg handling 24/7 settlement and FX while the merchant and payer see only their normal QR rails. This is a divergent bet within the SGD stablecoin race, since most jurisdictions debate stablecoin frameworks in the abstract while Singapore under MAS already has a live single-currency framework with StraitsX as its reference issuer, giving the SGD a credible programmable-money presence that the HKD, KRW, and AUD do not yet match at comparable transaction scale. The asset-class scope is deliberately narrow, fiat-referenced payment stablecoins, not tokenised deposits or tokenised funds, which keeps the instrument inside the SCS perimeter and out of the bank-deposit-claim frame that DBS and other banks occupy.

Named products and pilots

  • XSGD. SGD-pegged stablecoin, live on Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, Arbitrum, Zilliqa, Hedera, and XRPL, and acknowledged by MAS as substantively compliant with the SCS framework (StraitsX, 16 December 2025).
  • XUSD. USD-pegged stablecoin first deployed on Ethereum as an ERC-20 in February 2024, live on Ethereum and BNB Smart Chain, acknowledged by MAS as compliant with the upcoming stablecoin framework (StraitsX, 17 July 2024).
  • Alipay+ / GrabPay cross-border merchant settlement. Inbound tourists pay at GrabPay merchants in Singapore using Alipay+ partner wallets, with XSGD on Avalanche and PBM handling backend clearing and 24/7 SGD settlement, live since October 2024; transaction volume grew 174% year on year across 22 payment apps in 14 countries (StraitsX, as of 2025) (StraitsX case study).
  • Purpose Bound Money origination with Ant International and Grab (announced November 2023). The originating collaboration behind the Alipay+/GrabPay rollout above: GrabPay merchants accept Alipay+ payments, XSGD provides real-time settlement, and PBM smart contracts enforce conditional, whitelisted use, announced November 2023 ahead of the 2024 Singapore launch (StraitsX).
  • KBank Q Wallet (Thailand to Singapore). KASIKORNBANK's Q-money interoperates with XSGD so Thai travellers tap GrabPay QR codes in Singapore, with PBM providing controls and StraitsX real-time settlement; launched 7 April 2026 under the Bank of Thailand regulatory sandbox (StraitsX, 7 April 2026).
  • Project Orchid PBM pilots. Early Purpose Bound Money work with Grab under MAS's Project Orchid, piloted at Singapore Fintech Festival 2022 (GlobeNewswire, 1 November 2022).
  • Solana deployment. XSGD and XUSD slated for Solana in early 2026 in collaboration with the Solana Foundation, both supporting the x402 standard for automated agent-to-agent payments (StraitsX, 16 December 2025).

Institutional partnerships

The operationally meaningful partnerships are settlement relationships, not logos. grab supplies the GrabPay merchant network as the acceptance and settlement endpoint; Ant International brings the Alipay+ inbound-tourist base and uses its Whale treasury platform to improve PBM interoperability; KASIKORNBANK supplies Q-money and the Quarix chain (built by its Orbix subsidiary) for the Thailand corridor. On reserves, StraitsX names DBS for cash management and custody of the assets backing its stablecoins (StraitsX, 17 July 2024). The reserve discipline is the load-bearing claim for institutional comfort: reserves held at a level equal to at least 100% of outstanding SCS in circulation, subject to independent external audit.

Regulatory perimeter

StraitsX operates through several MAS-licensed entities. On 17 July 2024 MAS granted MPI licences to StraitsX USD Issuance Pte. Ltd., StraitsX SGD Issuance Pte. Ltd., and StraitsX Payment Services Pte. Ltd., and approved Xfers Pte. Ltd. to vary its existing MPI licence, with the group authorised for six of the seven regulated payment services including e-money issuance, money transfers, and digital payment tokens (StraitsX, 17 July 2024). The SCS acknowledgement for XSGD is the perimeter that distinguishes it from unregulated SGD-referenced tokens. The cross-border legs sit under host-jurisdiction supervision: the KBank corridor runs in the Bank of Thailand regulatory sandbox and references the MAS BLOOM initiative launched in October 2025 (StraitsX, 7 April 2026).

Recent activity

  • 2026-04-07. KASIKORNBANK, StraitsX, and Grab launched the Q Wallet extension letting Thai travellers pay GrabPay merchants in Singapore, settled on-chain via XSGD with PBM controls, under the Bank of Thailand regulatory sandbox (StraitsX).
  • 2025-12-16. Solana Foundation collaboration announced to bring XSGD and XUSD to Solana in early 2026, both natively supporting the x402 agent-payment standard, with over USD 18 billion in combined on-chain volume cited as of that date (StraitsX).
  • 2024-11-05. Ant International, Grab, and StraitsX deepened the PBM cross-border merchant partnership first signed at Singapore Fintech Festival 2023 (Ledger Insights).
  • 2024-07-17. MPI licences granted and XUSD launched (StraitsX).

Open questions

  • Current outstanding supply of XSGD and XUSD is not consistently disclosed in published primary sources; the USD 18 billion figure is cumulative on-chain volume as of December 2025, not circulating supply.
  • The agentic-commerce signal is unusually concrete here, since native x402 support positions XSGD and XUSD among the first stablecoins designed for agent-to-agent settlement. Whether MAS's SCS perimeter and PBM controls are written to accommodate an AI agent as the holder or counterparty of a regulated stablecoin, rather than only a human-operated wallet, is unresolved in published guidance.
  • The split between XSGD's broad multi-chain footprint and XUSD's narrower one (Ethereum, BNB Smart Chain) is not explained in sourced material.