Borderless by Design: The Brave New World of FX On-Chain
By Tianwei Liu, CEO and Co-Founder, StraitsX and Leroy Mah, Regional Head, Ava Labs
Global commerce has never been more interconnected, yet the systems that move capital across borders remain entrenched in dated infrastructure. Despite a market currently worth over US$194 trillion and forecasted to reach US$320 trillion by 2032, moving capital globally remains slow, opaque, and expensive, particularly for corporates navigating multi-market operations. Beneath this inefficiency lies a structural truth: the global FX layer was built for a fragmented world, not the digitally interconnected one we now inhabit.
For businesses operating in this new reality, cross-border payments are no longer a peripheral concern. They sit at the heart of treasury, trade, and supply chain execution. Yet these flows continue to rely on legacy financial systems – systems dependent on intermediaries, restricted by banking hours, and burdened by spreads and hidden fees. These are not simply friction points, but are operational liabilities.
In a world of on-demand everything, where communication, logistics, and even labour can be accessed in real-time, the latency of global money movement feels increasingly anachronistic. Why should money move any slower? The case for rethinking FX is no longer about streamlining costs but also about redesigning the infrastructure fit for a world that expects immediacy, transparency, and precision. This is where the emergence of FX-as-a-Service, powered by regulated stablecoins and programmable infrastructure, is quickly becoming recognised not just as a value-added service, but a necessity. What was once a fringe innovation is becoming an institutional imperative: a foundational layer that transforms how value is priced, exchanged, and settled, particularly in multi-asset environments.
Unpacking the inertia: Where the costs hide
The bottlenecks in today’s cross-border systems are not always visible to the end-users. Much of the friction in cross-border payments today originates from the way FX is being handled within the legacy financial system. Transactions can take days to settle, exposing corporates to FX volatility, while administrative overhead drains treasury resources. Even for high-volume, time-sensitive transactions such as cross-border payroll or multi-currency treasury operations, settlement can take multiple days and include hidden or unpredictable costs before reaching finality.
For businesses, this complexity introduces operational risk. Volatile intraday exchange rates can lead to misaligned cash flow forecasts. Manual reconciliation across multiple intermediaries stretches treasury resources and introduces room for error. And even when digital front ends suggest efficiency, the back end often depends on a deeply analog system of approvals, ledgers, and netting arrangements.
Increasingly, forward-looking companies are turning to stablecoin-enabled platforms for a more seamless experience. Using fiat-backed stablecoins such as SGD- and USD-denominated stablecoins, coupled with smart contract logic, they are streamlining real-time FX conversion and embedding programmable controls into settlement processes. Ultimately, what then emerges is a new model for liquidity management, where FX is embedded into the business logic of payments, not added on as a costly afterthought. This shift offers not just marginal gains, but the possibility of fundamentally rethinking how liquidity is accessed and managed in global finance.
The shift to FX-as-a-Service: Infrastructure, not innovation
The shift from manual, bank-driven FX to FX-as-a-Service is not merely an upgrade in speed, but it represents a more radical departure than it may first appear. It is not just that transactions settle faster. It is that the entire relationship between financial institutions, users, both individuals and corporations, and innovative fintechs is redefined.
In an FX-as-a-Service model, currency conversion becomes programmable, triggered by business logic, integrated into smart contracts, and executed based on real-time conditions. This opens the door to use cases previously difficult to accomplish: an automated rebalancing of multi-currency reserves, smart settlement in local currencies, or dynamic pricing that adapts to live exchange rates.
Perhaps most importantly, this infrastructure operates 24/7 and is not tethered to clearing house windows or the availability of market makers. Stablecoins like the XSGD are already among the most widely adopted non-USD fiat-backed tokens, demonstrating that FX liquidity can exist outside of legacy systems, without compromising regulatory oversight or operational reliability. The recent introduction of additional stablecoin pairs, like USD-backed variants, further expands the use cases for regional FX and cross-border settlements seamlessly and efficiently.
These systems are already being plugged into real-world applications via blockchain-based infrastructural APIs, enabling developers and enterprises to integrate currency exchange directly into their operational flows. As FX becomes a strategic imperative for banks and other financial institutions, its treatment as a downstream process is no longer viable. Rather than treating FX as a downstream process, it becomes a programmable layer of business infrastructure that is faster, more transparent, and inherently more adaptable to today’s global economy.
Infrastructure for Compliant, Programmable FX
The existing blockchain infrastructure has reached a stage of maturity, with public chains like Avalanche enabling institutions to launch their own permissionless or permissioned networks easily. These chains can be programmed to meet specific business needs and be fully compliant with regulatory requirements across jurisdictions, covering AML, KYC, and integrated privacy solutions, while remaining interoperable with the broader public chain ecosystem to avoid liquidity fragmentation.
Networks like Avalanche, with high-speed finality, subnet architecture, and composability, set the foundation for a truly 24/7, programmable, and automated FX solution, accessible globally via on-chain liquidity pools that can support multiple stablecoin pairings.
In fact, these capabilities have progressed beyond theoretical conception and are currently being implemented in practice. By combining the strengths of StraitsX’s regulated stablecoin settlement flows and Avalanche’s programmable infrastructure, over 1 billion potential tourists from Alipay+ network wallet users can now pay GrabPay merchants in Singapore using their native currency directly in-app. Meanwhile, merchants receive SGD through XSGD on Avalanche ensuring seamless cross-border transactions.
Live in production as part of the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s Project Orchid, this initiative showcases the practical impact and ease of integrating on-chain FX: instant settlement, regulatory alignment, and a markedly improved user experience for ecosystem participants.
The frontier now lies in integration, creating intelligent, self-executing financial flows that adapt in real time to business needs and market conditions. This is not a distant vision. It is a quiet transformation that is already underway, reshaping how global liquidity is accessed, managed, and deployed. In a world where the demand for financial interoperability is only accelerating, programmable FX is not simply a technical improvement; it is a strategic necessity.
