9. Where they appear in production
In the US and globally, USDC distribution is the canonical production case for a payment stablecoin: minted and redeemed against the issuer, used for cross-border movement, exchange settlement, and as unit of account in much of DeFi. Tether occupies a similar role with a different jurisdictional footprint and a heavier presence in offshore and emerging-markets flows.
In Japan, JPYC's transition to a registered fund-transfer service provider (FTSP), completed in August 2025 with the first FSA-approved yen stablecoin issued in October 2025, is the worked example of the post-2023 japan regime. Megabank consortia have shipped trust-issued products such as Progmat in parallel; bank-direct issuance remains available but slower to ship.
In hong kong, the post-Ordinance period has produced a queue of HKD stablecoin contenders, bank-led, payment-firm-led, and technology-firm-led, targeting the HKMA licensing perimeter. The interest is partly domestic payments, partly the offshore renminbi corridor, and partly tokenised settlement use cases linked to the HKMA's Project Ensemble work on tokenised deposits and wholesale CBDC.
In singapore, the MAS posture under the Payment Services Act (PSA) has been to define a single-currency stablecoin perimeter and leave broader tokenised cash work to bank-led pilots. SGD stablecoin issuance under the framework has begun in modest size.
9.1 Singapore's MAS Single-Currency Stablecoin framework
Singapore's posture deserves its own treatment, because the MAS framework is structurally different from the Hong Kong route covered above and different again from the broader PSA-licensed payments work.
The MAS published its Single-Currency Stablecoin (SCS) framework in August 2023, after a public consultation that ran in parallel with its Project Orchid CBDC research. The two tracks were deliberately kept separate. Project Orchid explores tokenised cash and purpose-bound money in a wholesale and pilot context; the SCS framework is the production perimeter for private, fiat-backed issuance.
By scope, an SCS must be a single-currency stablecoin denominated in SGD or any G10 currency. That choice immediately rules certain instruments out: USDC and USDT, as currently structured globally, cannot themselves be MAS-regulated SCS, because the issuing entities sit outside the MAS perimeter. A G10-denominated SCS issued from Singapore by a MAS-licensed entity is the in-scope shape.
Issuers must be regulated as Major Payment Institutions (MPIs) under the Payment Services Act, with bank-grade reserve and capital requirements layered on top. Reserves must be held in cash, cash equivalents, or short-dated debt securities denominated in the pegged currency, and must be held with an independent custodian rather than commingled on the issuer's own balance sheet. Holders have a redemption right at par.
The market-signal piece is the part operators sometimes miss. The framework was deliberately designed so that "MAS-regulated SCS" functions as a label issuers can use to differentiate themselves from unregulated stablecoins circulating in the same market. Compliance is the perimeter; the brand is the upside.
Contrast with Hong Kong is the useful editorial lens. Hong Kong stretched its perimeter to fit a wider set of fiat-referenced designs under one Ordinance. Singapore took a narrower licensing route, restricting scope to single G10 currencies and channelling issuance through the MPI regime. Both have produced workable regimes. The difference is structural rather than stylistic, and an APAC operator picking a jurisdiction needs to understand which structure their product actually fits.
For tokenised MMFs, BUIDL, FOBXX, and OUSG are the most-cited production cases. BUIDL has become a reference instrument for on-chain cash collateral among institutional counterparties despite being structurally a fund interest, not a stablecoin. The use case is treasury-style: park dollars, earn the front-end yield, retain on-chain transferability among permissioned holders.
10. What to read next
Chapter III, Bank money and central-bank money, sits naturally next: it covers the layer that payment stablecoins and tokenised MMFs sit alongside, and explains why tokenised deposits are a separate animal again. Chapter VII, Tokenised deposits, goes deep on the bank-money-on-chain category, which is the fourth flavour you will hear discussed in TradFi rooms even though it is not a stablecoin in any of the senses above. The regulatory tracker maintained alongside this wiki tracks the live status of MiCA authorisations, HKMA licensees, GENIUS-permitted issuers, PSA-registered Japanese issuers, and the Korean two-phase build-out, and is the place to check before quoting a perimeter in a memo.