Stablecoins at Scale: Building the Settlement Layer for Real-World Assets
By Tianwei Liu, CEO and Co-Founder of StraitsX
In recent years, few concepts have captured the financial industry’s attention quite like tokenisation. From real estate and private credit to government bonds and art, nearly every form of value is now a potential candidate for being represented as a digital token on a public or private blockchain. The market momentum is also hard to ignore, with experts recently making projections that the value of tokenised real-world assets (RWAs) could reach as high as $10 trillion by the end of this decade. Yet despite this rapid acceleration, one foundational challenge remains unresolved, and that is the lack of a trusted and programmable settlement layer built for institutional scale..
Issuance is no longer the bottleneck. The industry has seen a proliferation of tokenised instruments, supported by maturing protocols, marketplaces, and proof-of-concept pilots. But tokenising assets is only half of the equation. Without infrastructure that supports secure, compliant, real-time settlement, particularly in fiat terms, tokenisation risks stalling before it scales. This is the very disconnect between representation and settlement that stablecoins, particularly those built for regulatory alignment and operational certainty, must fill before they can become essential infrastructure.
Building the XSGD Rail
This structural gap is precisely the challenge that StraitsX and Ripple have come together to address. Most recently, StraitsX launched its Singapore dollar-backed stablecoin (XSGD) on the XRP Ledger (XRPL), marking a critical milestone in the evolution of tokenised finance in Asia Pacific. At its core, XSGD is not just a digital version of the Singapore dollar, but it is a programmable, fully reserved asset backed 1:1 by fiat currency, with reserves held by some of the region’s most trusted financial institutions, among them being DBS Bank and Standard Chartered.
Regulated under a Major Payment Institution (MPI) license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, XSGD adheres to rigorous security, compliance, and transparency standards, which include bi-monthly attestations of reserves, allowing it to function as a trusted on-chain counterpart to traditional fiat. Its availability on multiple chains, including Ethereum, Polygon, Avalanche, and now XRPL, ensures that XSGD is not just confined to a singular blockchain ecosystem, but is instead designed for interoperability between retail and institutional systems as well as decentralised finance (DeFi) and traditional finance (TradFi).
The integration with XRPL reinforces this as it is purpose-built for financial applications. It enables real-time settlement and supports tokenisation at scale while maintaining the security and throughput necessary for real-world use cases. What this means in practice is that tokenised assets, whether T-bills, account receivables, or programmable payouts, can now settle against a trusted digital Singapore dollar in real-time, removing pain points that have long plagued traditional banking rails.
Solving for Scale: Certainty, Risk, and Interoperability
Together, this partnership directly addresses three structural challenges that have historically limited tokenisation’s fullest potential. First, it enables operational certainty. The programmable nature of stablecoins such as XSGD allows smart contracts to execute condition-based logic around settlements, making every transaction feasible without manual intervention. By using a stable, fiat-backed digital asset as the unit of settlement, transactions also no longer rely on trust between parties, but on verifiable reserves and deterministic outcomes.
Most importantly, it also enables cross-border FX flexibility. In a world where tokenised RWAs will exist across an ever-growing number of platforms, the ability to settle against multiple stablecoin denominations, including StraitsX’s Singapore dollar-backed XSGD and USD-pegged stablecoin XUSD, provides the FX flexibility needed to fuel cross-border capital flows. But beyond these immediate benefits lies a deeper implication for institutional adoption.
For tokenisation to gain traction with banks, asset managers, and large corporates, it must speak the language of existing financial systems, not by replacing them but enhancing them. This means offering integration points with legacy treasury management infrastructure, clear compliance tooling, and jurisdictional clarity. By actively engaging with financial institutions and operating under Singapore’s stablecoin framework, which is widely regarded as a global benchmark, StraitsX is demonstrating that stablecoins need not exist in regulatory grey zones to be useful. On the contrary, regulation is fast becoming a prerequisite for institutional adoption and scale.
Asia’s Trillion-Dollar Challenge and Opportunity
And scale is what the market is demanding. With cross-border commerce in Asia forecasted to exceed US$4 trillion by 2030, the ability to move value efficiently, securely, and compliantly across borders will no longer be a nice-to-have; it will be foundational. In this context, Asia is more than a proving ground. It is a lead indicator of where global digital finance is heading. From QR-based payments to CBDC experimentation and real-world stablecoin usage, Asia has consistently outpaced other regions in digital finance adoption.
While stablecoins are evolving along different trajectories across the globe, Asia is emerging as the testbed for a more fundamental shift that combines regulatory ambition with technological maturity. This momentum gives stablecoins like XSGD a critical role to play not just within Asia but in shaping the blueprint for cross-border settlement globally.
It is apparent that stablecoins are fast evolving into the programmable infrastructure that will power a new era of interoperability, trust, and scale. But to realise the broader promise of tokenisation, one that reimagines how value is exchanged, settled, and secured globally, we must move from proof-of-concepts to institutional-grade systems.
Distinguishing Towards a Trusted Settlement Layer for the Next Phase of Tokenised Finance
StraitsX’s approach continues to be grounded in regulatory rigour, technical interoperability, and institutional partnership, which offers a transformative model for how stablecoins can evolve from niche financial instruments in decentralised finance into foundational building blocks for the next chapter of the global financial ecosystem.
The partnership with Ripple and XSGD’s integration with XRPL does not just point to where stablecoins are headed, it is a mere glimpse into the architecture and infrastructure of tomorrow’s global financial system, one where programmable, real-time, and compliant value movement is a norm. In this future, stablecoins are the necessary rails for real-world payments.
