T+0 Plus Zero: Coins.ph CEO Wei Zhou on the Speed of Money

We still run an exchange, but I think of Coins.ph more broadly as financial infrastructure. The exchange gives us the liquidity layer, but we are also a regulated wallet, a payments platform, and a bridge between local currencies and global digital assets.

My co-founder and I describe the goal as getting financial transactions as close as possible to T+0 plus zero. In the payments world, T+0 refers to settlement time, and the second zero is the cost. You want both as close to zero as possible.

In the Philippines, we are already quite close in certain corridors. You can move from USDC into pesos at very tight pricing, receive the pesos directly in your wallet and use them for everyday payments. The broader mission is to build that infrastructure across more markets and corridors.

Stablecoins have reached a point where they are no longer used only by crypto traders. They are becoming real financial infrastructure for consumers, businesses, fintechs and financial institutions.

If you look at USDT specifically, in emerging markets it has given anyone outside the US access to a US dollar checking account, essentially. I don’t get any interest on it, but I can use it. All I need is a wallet, and I can convert my local currency through whatever exchange I use locally and get USDT pretty easily. That gives me access to basically everything dollar-denominated.

In Asia, USDT is still the dominant stablecoin, whether it is Hong Kong, Singapore, Thailand, Indonesia, or other regions. From the US perspective, it is mainly USDC.

The macro side is also important. In markets where local currencies are depreciating, you typically see people willing to pay a premium to buy dollars, USDT or USDC. But for stablecoin usage to really take off, you need more than demand. You need regulated infrastructure, bidirectional flow, and good pricing.

On our exchange, our price is comparable every day, every hour, to the bank mid-market rate for FX, and you can do it at size. That is a key piece of infrastructure. Once that exists, you don’t just have crypto traders using it. You have real companies, financial institutions, banks, payment companies and newer fintech startups.

The common issue is that you are going to need a license to operate. You can’t run something like LocalBitcoins with stablecoins. No regulated financial institution is going to run on a P2P model. If you are a business, you want to do things you can scale.

The model we built in the Philippines is quite unique compared to other regions because you need flow. We have a license in Thailand and have been operating there, but Thailand isn’t a major cross-border payment or remittance country. The flow just isn’t there, even if you have the infrastructure.

You need to sit in major flows in both directions. If people only want to move out of the local currency because it is depreciating, that is one-directional demand. You need bidirectional flow for it to really work.

You also need a mature banking system. If your banks don’t have APIs that you can connect to for automatic deposits, you are still stuck at the fiat leg. A lot of times, people still have to call a desk or physically go inside a branch.

The lesson is that blockchain solves part of the problem, but you still need licenses, banking access, liquidity, and real payment flows.

We run an exchange, so people naturally come in to exchange pesos for peso stablecoins. As long as we provide that channel, and you can do it anytime and at any size, you can essentially get out of using banks even for pesos.

It is about providing services without friction, and the friction most people face is at the banking level, not the crypto level. You have that ease of use with US dollar stablecoins already, but not really with pesos right now. Once we add a peso stablecoin, a lot of that friction goes away.

What it unlocks is that anyone holding USDC can buy peso stablecoins anytime, on a DEX or on our platform. If you want to invest in peso-denominated financial products, you then have that option.

Once we build that liquidity layer between the peso and the dollar, it will unlock opportunities for peso holders to access the dollar world and for dollar holders to access the peso world.

That is something we have been educating regulators about. I tell them, ‘Don’t think of it as stablecoins. Think of it as dollars on a blockchain. It moves at the speed of light. Your currency still moves at the speed of water. You need your currency to move at the same speed, or everyone holding it is going to move into the faster one.’

A lot of the more progressive regulators are starting to understand that. They have given us a sandbox approach for the peso-backed stablecoin, and we are hoping to get out of the sandbox by the end of the year.

One market we are really excited about is Latin America, mainly because you have major flows with the US in both directions.

Whether it is buyers of agricultural products, people living in the US sending money home or Chinese sellers in Latin America wanting to take money out, you see a flow that is similar to what we see in the Philippines.

As each country rolls out licensing regimes for crypto and payments, I think there is a pretty big opportunity to copy and paste what we have built in the Philippines into Latin America, namely Brazil, Argentina and Colombia. Those are the major markets down there.

The key is that the flows have to exist in both directions. Once you combine those flows with licensing, local banking access and stablecoin liquidity, you can significantly reduce the time and cost involved in moving money internationally.

You need a license, and you need to sit in major flows both ways. You also need a corresponding payment partner or payment license holder.

In the payment world, you can do third-party collection and third-party disbursement, but as a licensed crypto exchange, you can’t necessarily do that. Under the travel rule, crypto companies can generally only send to the same name. If you try to go the other way, people will ask what the purpose of the money is.

You can’t really act as a third-party intermediary processing payment transactions without a payment license. So we would want a partner in the payments world that uses our services to do that.

From an expansion standpoint, that is the infrastructure we have realized is necessary. Once it is in place, stablecoins basically become synonymous with the US dollar. Products built on top of stablecoins, whether that is stocks, lending or cards, make much more sense because you can swap your money in and out without thinking about the cost.

But you have to build it corridor by corridor. Maybe it is the Europe-to-Philippines corridor or the Hong Kong-to-Philippines corridor. Once we have built out the Philippines corridor with many of the sending countries, we can add Brazil, Colombia or Nigeria on the receiving end, either ourselves or with local partners.

At the end of the day, it is about building a network. One of the best ways to improve pricing and liquidity is to drive as much volume through that network as possible. Initially, it is not retail. It is mostly businesses, because they move real, significant volume. A lot of the early adopters are cross-border payment and cross-border e-commerce players.

My co-founder and I have a goal of getting financial transactions down to T+0 plus zero, as close as possible. In the payment world, T+0 refers to how long things take to settle. The second zero is the cost, and you want that as close to zero as possible.

In certain markets and countries, that is technically impossible because there are intentional barriers set up to keep money from moving as fast as you would want. But in certain corridors, we are pretty close.

Between the US and the Philippines today, if you are a normal person with a Coinbase wallet and a Coins.ph wallet, you can get close to T+0 plus zero. You deposit money, buy USDC, send it to Coins, sell the USDC into pesos at maybe five basis points, and then you have pesos in your wallet.

Because we are an e-wallet in the Philippines, you can scan and pay as you would with normal money. So that is T+0 plus five or ten basis points.

That is what we hope to achieve more broadly, but we have realized that you have to build it corridor by corridor. Once we build out the Philippines corridor with more sending countries, we can add markets such as Brazil, Colombia or Nigeria on the receiving end, either ourselves or with local partners.

Ultimately, success is building a network where money can move across borders almost instantly and at close to zero cost.