Bangkok, 24 August 2026 — SCBX, a leading financial technology group in Thailand, today released “Powering Southeast Asia’s Digital Future,” a comprehensive report co-authored with Hashed Open Research (HOR), the policy think tank of global Web3 venture firm Hashed. Drawing on research and closed-door roundtables hosted at Southeast Asia Blockchain Week (SEABW) 2026, the report offers one of the most detailed views to date of how the region is transitioning from speculative activity into meaningful, systemic financial infrastructure.
Convened in Bangkok by Hashed and ShardLab in partnership with SCBX, SEABW 2026 drew more than 4,000 attendees and over 100 speakers from across the globe, making it the largest blockchain gathering in the region to date. The report distills perspectives from senior policymakers, global protocol leaders, and financial institutions — including keynote speakers from SCBX, Hashed, and ShardLab and participants across four closed-door institutional roundtables.
A Two-Part View: From Regional Landscape to Institutional Reality
The report is structured in two parts. The first provides a macro-overview of the digital-asset landscape across the SEA-6 — Singapore, Thailand, Malaysia, Vietnam, the Philippines, and Indonesia — mapping each market’s regulatory approach, key developments, and open questions. The second synthesizes frontline insights from the event’s keynote speakers and four closed-door institutional roundtables, uncovering the commercial realities and opportunities shaping the region.
Insights from Regulators, Global Protocols, and Leading Institutions
The report captures frontline perspectives from senior leaders across the digital-asset value chain. Keynote addresses were delivered by Kaweewut Temphuwapat, Chief Innovation Officer of SCBX and CEO of SCB 10X; Simon Kim, CEO and Managing Partner of Hashed; and Hojin Kim, CEO of ShardLab.
These were complemented by four closed-door institutional roundtables that convened regulators, global protocols, builders, and financial institutions — including the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) Thailand, Bitkub, Avalanche, Tether, Token X, Base, and Kite, with several participants managing over USD 1 billion in tokenized assets — for candid, non-attributable discussion of the region's commercial and operational realities.
A Region at an Inflection Point
Southeast Asia is a mobile-first economy of nearly 700 million people that has leapfrogged from cash to mobile payments. The report highlights the scale of this transformation:
- Aggregate ASEAN nominal GDP reached USD 4.17 trillion in 2025, the fourth-largest economy globally, while the region’s digital economy GMV reached USD 305 billion.
- More than 60% of all payments are now digital — a full inversion of the cash baseline in 2019.
- Four of the ten most crypto-active countries globally are in Southeast Asia — Vietnam, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand — while on-chain transaction value across Asia-Pacific rose from USD 1.4 trillion to USD 2.36 trillion in the year to June 2025, the fastest growth of any region globally.
Diverging Strategies Across the Region
The report identifies clearly diverging trajectories: Vietnam and the Philippines are orienting their ecosystems to capture existing consumer flows; Singapore, Thailand, and Malaysia are engineering licensed, local-currency infrastructure with growing institutional uptake; and Indonesia holds crypto as a supervised consumer asset while reserving its strategic ambition for sovereign rails. Thailand is noted as Southeast Asia’s most diversified digital-asset stack, with SCBX among the most active institutional participants translating regulatory frameworks into live deployments.
The Bottleneck Has Shifted from Regulation to Commercial Execution
A central conclusion of the report is that the global digital-asset market has internalized a critical lesson from the past decade: regulatory ambiguity is no longer the primary constraint, and foundational ledger settlement is largely a solved problem. The remaining bottlenecks are commercial and operational — requiring deeper alignment with the commercial banking layer, seamless last-mile payouts across fragmented local currencies, and genuine secondary-market liquidity for tokenized real-world assets. The report emphasizes that the ultimate value proposition of the technology lies not in raw transaction speed, but in its inherent programmability.
“A region characterized by such deep structural fragmentation cannot mature through capital injections or regulatory mandates alone,” the report concludes. “The connective tissue built between prudent, yet forward-looking regulators, commercial banks, local builders, and global allocators will ultimately dictate the scale of the region’s talent and infrastructure — the structural, long-term work to which Hashed, ShardLab, and SCBX remain deeply committed.”
Read the full report: "Powering Southeast Asia's Digital Future" is available for download at Powering Southeast Asia's Digital Future | SCBX
ไม่มีความคิดเห็น:
แสดงความคิดเห็น