Thailand’s True Money wants to use stablecoins to ease overseas spending and investing
It all makes sense, but getting permission from regulators and banks will not be easy
Welcome back to Asia Tech Review, your curated digest to keep up to date with tech news across Asia.
Every weekday, we send you 2-3 of the most important items from Asia Tech from the previous day, and a list of other news you’ll want to know.
True Money, Thailand’s top digital wallet, wants to use stablecoins to ease overseas spending and investing
Currency exchange booths and expensive ATM withdrawals whilst traveling could be a thing of the past for tourists in Southeast Asia thanks to stablecoins, according to Thailand’s largest digital wallet company.
True Money, which claims over 30 million users, is currently experimenting with a Thai baht-pegged stablecoin which includes a strong vision for making overseas spending easier and cheaply. The digital currency (Thai Baht TrueMoney, THBT) could easily be swapped to Singapore dollars, Malaysian ringgit or other stablecoin-based currencies, a top executive explained at an event in Bangkok.
Currently, travelers rely on archaic and expensive systems to spend overseas. But Apinand Dabpetch, head of growth for Ascend Money, which operates True Money, explained how easy the process could be, if the THBT initiative is able to graduate from the Bank of Thailand’s Enhanced Regulatory Sandbox, where it is being tested with a limited user base.
“We hope the roadmap would be to introduce new use cases, not only from wallet to wallet transfer but including cross-border payments as well,” he said. “Imagine with our partnership with StraitsX in Singapore, you can swap from the Thai baht token into Singapore dollar and off-ramp. The swap would happen on-chain and cost a fraction of a dollar.”
That SGD token could be off-ramped immediately into a Singapore account or app and then be spent.
“This would be a quicker, cheaper and more efficient way to move the money from Thailand to Singapore or to any other Southeast Asian countrie we pair our token with,” he added.
Ascend Money includes Alibaba among its investors and it is one of Thailand’s few unicorn companies valued at over $1 billion, even though its origin story is a spinout of Thai megacorporation True. The company rarely discusses its moonshot initiatives in public, and in English. Payments are the main focus of Ascend, hence the interest from Alibaba, and stablecoins are a major focus for Dabpetch.
He also outlined another scenario in which the Ascend team linked its THBT crypto wallet to a Claude-based agent, which was instructed to incrementally buy gold-backed stablecoins for a month with spare cash based on the rise and fall of gold prices.
“After that we got a bunch of XAUT tokens (the gold-backed stablecoin from Tether) but the gold price kept going down after that,” he joked. “But the point is we can use our programmable money… this is something that we foresee that will happen outside of the traditional finance system.”
It won’t be easy for these use cases to make it out of the lab or beyond the theory book. Thailand’s central bank, like others across the world, is reluctant to cede control to stablecoins just because they enable futuristic or edgy use cases.
Dabpetch admitted that Ascend Money and seven other participants in the sandbox must show “sufficient risk control and on-chain risk analysis” for their stablecoin, which runs on a closed network. If a transaction lands on the network, “we have to know the source of funds of this incoming money right away and whether they are legitimate or not,” he added.
That will mean private chains will rule, the antithesis of what blockchain was supposed to bring to the financial world. For users, that means greater surveillance of what they spend, where they spend it, etc. When regulators hold the cards, that’s the inevitable outcome.
Notably, True Money’s regional footprint weakened last month when it shut its Philippines operation, which claimed 5 million customers and 20,000 SMEs.
Yotta, India’s top Nvidia GPU provider, is eyeing a $900M IPO
India’s key AI player is not a household name, but it is preparing to go public in a massive listing that could raise $900 million.
Yotta Data Services, which is responsible for as much as 70% of the country’s GPU power, is preparing for an IPO before the end of the year, according to a report from Bloomberg.
The firm has been acquiring Nvidia GPUs since 2023, with Nvidia itself proclaiming that Yotta has built India’s first ‘sovereign’ AI infrastructure with its Shakti Cloud platform.
During India’s inaugural AI summit in February, Yotta announced plans to spend an additional $2 billion on Nvidia chips and set up its first artificial intelligence computing hub within its New Delhi facility. It operates two other locations in Mumbai and Gujarat.
Such is the strength of its arsenal, CEO Sunil Gupta told CNBC that most of the AI models launched at the event were trained using its facilities. Going forward, he added, Yotta expected to work with international companies that wanted local infrastructure to grow their presence in India.
Gupta talked about a planned IPO back in February so it’s not a huge surprise to see Bloomberg’s story today, which adds further numbers to show the sheer scale of what Yotta is building.
The business is backed by real estate firm Hiranandani Group, its billionaire founder Niranjan Hiranandani serves as chairman emeritus with his son, Darshan, Yotta’s chairman and co-founder. There were previous rumours that Mubadala was in discussions to invest before the planned listing, but all sides denied the suggestion earlier this year.
India’s IPO rush hasn’t seen many listings linked to AI so if Yotta is able to IPO on the timeframe set out, it could become an interesting proxy for investors. GPU data centres is a capital intensive business. It makes sense that Hiranandani Group is looking for additional financial support and an early return on its investment to date.
In other interesting news you won’t want to miss:
Speaking of AI in India: Krutrim, the project from ride-hailing company Ola, has been hit by a wave of senior exits, with the heads of its AI initiatives and nearly 10 semiconductor executives leaving in recent months [The Economic Times]
The US is trying to navigate the global shortage in memory chips through Pax Silica, its 5-month-old supply chain coalition that spans 14 countries across Europe, the Middle East and Asia [Nikkei Asia]
Samsung is now valued at more than $1 trillion, the second company in Asia after TSMC, after last week’s record financials thanks to surging demand for AI chips [Reuters]
Ireland’s regulator is investigating Shein over apparent data transfer of European user data to China [Reuters]
Sinica Podcast has an insight edition on the potential unwinding of Meta’s acquisition of Manus [Sinica]