Stablecoins Seen as New Rails for Global Finance

Coins.ph Chief Executive Officer Wei Zhou is betting that regulated stablecoin rails can lower the cost of remittances, widen access to dollars and bring millions of underbanked users into the financial system.

When Wei Zhou tried to move his own savings from Asia to the United States to buy a family home, he ran into the same problem faced by millions of cross-border workers and families: the traditional financial system was slow, expensive and difficult to navigate.

“That whole process just took like a month and a half,” he recalls. “I thought to myself there’s got to be a better way of getting things done.”

Eventually, he turned to Bitcoin. For Zhou, it was a revelation. Bitcoin stopped being an abstract technology or speculative trade. It became a working alternative to a system that had failed him when he needed it most.

“At that time I was like, oh my, this thing exists kind of completely outside of the existing financial system,” he says.

That experience drew him into what he calls “the Bitcoin rabbit hole” and eventually led him to Coins.ph, the Philippines’ leading fully regulated fiat, crypto and mobile wallet provider, holding dual Virtual Asset Service Provider and Electronic Money Issuer licences from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas.