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SEA Weekly: Clearing the Field — Vietnam's Crypto Arrests, Grab's Governance Win, and the Stablecoin Layer Taking Shape

#Fintech #Digital Banking
10 min read
Chloe Tan
Chloe Tan Fintech Product Leader & Digital Banking Strategist

On March 23, Vietnamese authorities detained eight people connected to the ONUS cryptocurrency exchange — accusing them of creating fake tokens, manipulating prices, and misappropriating billions of dollars from investors going back to 2018. On March 27, a Fintech News Singapore summary reminded readers that Vietnam is simultaneously advancing the five-exchange licensing framework I covered last week. Most coverage treated these as separate stories. They are not.

Vietnam’s Clear-and-Replace Logic
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The ONUS arrest operation was large. Vietnam’s Ministry of Public Security coordinated searches across Hanoi, Ho Chi Minh City, Can Tho, Da Nang, and Dak Lak, summoning more than 140 individuals. The Investigation Security Agency initiated criminal proceedings for computer-network-facilitated asset misappropriation and money laundering, covering activity from 2018 to the present. Detained were Vuong Le Vinh Nhan, General Director of Digital Asset Management JSC; Tran Quang Chien, technical administrator of the ONUS exchange; Ngo Thi Thao, Director of HANAGOLD Jewelry JSC; and five others. ONUS, which had rebranded from VNDC Wallet and claimed more than seven million global users by the end of 2025, stands accused of fabricating the VNDC, ONUS, and HNG tokens through artificial trading activity and false promotional claims.

The conventional framing is that Vietnam is cracking down on crypto fraud. The more accurate framing is that Vietnam is sequencing its market transformation — enforcement first, licensing second. The two moves are not happening in spite of each other; they are happening because of each other.

Here is the logic: you cannot build a regulated domestic crypto market when seven million users are already embedded in an unregulated ecosystem operated by incumbents who will resist displacement. The ONUS arrests create the necessary vacuum. The licensed exchanges — Techcombank’s TCEX, VPBank’s CAEX, LPBank’s LPEX, VIX Securities, and Sun Group — fill it with state-proximate infrastructure, subject to the 0.1% transaction tax and 20% corporate income tax on trading profits that the government has been designing to recapture Vietnam’s estimated US$200 billion in annual offshore crypto flows.

The uncomfortable implication for anyone building crypto-adjacent products in Vietnam: the market is opening, but only via a narrow gate. The entities holding those keys are domestic banks and conglomerates with regulatory relationships that took decades to build. The ONUS arrests are not a warning to the industry — they are the industry’s new entry barrier.

Grab: Governance Resolved, Capital Returned
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The timing of two Grab announcements this week would have been easy to miss amid the noise. On March 24, Grab held its extraordinary general meeting, where shareholders voted on the proposal to double the votes attached to each Class B share and cement CEO Anthony Tan’s voting power toward 75 percent. I covered the governance dimensions of that vote in my March 15 column and the regulatory rationale — MAS requiring GXS digital bank to remain Singaporean-controlled — in my March 22 column.

On March 25, one day later, Grab announced it would buy back up to US$400 million of its Class A ordinary shares over the next four months: US$250 million via an accelerated share repurchase agreement with JPMorgan Chase and up to US$150 million through a contingent forward purchase with Morgan Stanley — both drawing on the US$500 million repurchase programme its board approved in February. CFO Peter Oey described the move as exploiting “the current share price dislocation” to enhance shareholder value, framing it alongside Grab’s 2028 targets: US$1.5 billion in Adjusted EBITDA and 80 percent Adjusted Free Cash Flow conversion.

The sequencing is the tell. Grab did not announce the buyback before the EGM — it announced it after. The company, which posted its first full-year net profit in 2025 and holds US$5.4 billion in net cash liquidity, is now in a position to deploy capital at scale. The governance restructure and the buyback are two parts of the same message: Grab has resolved its existential questions and is now running a mature, capital-returning technology company. Whether you read the governance structure as founder entrenchment or regulatory compliance engineering depends on your priors. Either way, the operational inflection point is real.

Singapore’s RMB Bet
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On March 26, DBS and Bank of China signed a memorandum of understanding to deepen cooperation across fintech development, cross-border RMB solutions, trade finance, and sustainable finance in Singapore, Indonesia, and Vietnam. Tan Su Shan, the new CEO of DBS Group, described it as a renewal of a “long-term valued partnership.” BOC Chairman Ge Haijiao mentioned the 15th Five-Year Plan period and the international use of RMB.

Read in isolation, this is a routine bank-to-bank cooperation announcement. Read against the backdrop of April 2 — the date on which US President Trump has signalled a sweeping set of tariff impositions that markets have taken to calling “Liberation Day” — it looks somewhat more deliberate.

Singapore’s largest bank is deepening its RMB infrastructure relationship with China’s largest state bank precisely as the US-China trade environment enters one of its most uncertain periods in decades. Southeast Asia sits at the center of that tension: the region has absorbed enormous manufacturing investment over the past three years as China-US supply chain decoupling accelerated, and that investment has created dense financial flows between China and ASEAN markets that were largely denominated in USD. If US tariff pressure accelerates corporate decisions to invoice and settle in RMB rather than dollars — a shift that China has been quietly encouraging through its Cross-Border Interbank Payment System and bilateral currency swap arrangements — then DBS’s position as a deep-pocketed, MAS-regulated, RMB-capable intermediary becomes structurally more valuable.

I am not predicting that outcome. But I would note that Singapore’s banks do not sign strategic partnership agreements with Chinese state banks on a whim, and the timing is at minimum consistent with a hypothesis that DBS’s leadership has thought carefully about the scenario where RMB displaces USD in meaningful portions of regional trade finance.

The Stablecoin Layer, Assembled from Three Directions
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The most significant structural development this week received the least attention, because it arrived as three separate announcements rather than one coordinated headline.

On March 25, Ripple joined the Monetary Authority of Singapore’s BLOOM initiative and partnered with trade finance firm Unloq to pilot programmable trade settlement using the XRP Ledger and Ripple USD (RLUSD). BLOOM is MAS’s effort to develop interoperable settlement infrastructure using tokenised bank liabilities and regulated stablecoins; the pilot tests payment release contingent on commercial conditions like shipment verification — a model that meaningfully reduces working capital costs for cross-border SME trade.

On March 26, Triple-A joined Circle Payments Network as a Beneficiary Financial Institution. Under the integration, USDC handles back-end settlement while payouts reach recipients in local currency through domestic payment systems. CEO Eric Barbier described it as letting businesses “benefit from stablecoin infrastructure without needing to directly handle digital assets” — precisely the wrapper enterprise treasury teams require before they will touch any of this.

On March 27, Tazapay closed a US$36 million Series B extension led by Circle Ventures, with new participation from CMT Digital and Coinbase Ventures. Tazapay serves more than 1,000 enterprises and fintechs across 30 countries, has doubled revenue for three consecutive years, and holds licences in Singapore, Canada, Australia, and the US.

Three announcements, one pattern: the stablecoin-to-fiat settlement layer is being built simultaneously from the institutional side (MAS BLOOM/Ripple), the payments company side (Triple-A/Circle), and the infrastructure funding side (Tazapay/Circle Ventures). Circle Payments Network is emerging as the operating backbone, with Singapore as its regional hub. I covered the Thunes-Swift stablecoin integration last week as evidence that stablecoins were becoming boring in the best possible sense. This week is what the supply side looks like as it assembles itself.

One question worth keeping in mind: USDC-denominated settlement infrastructure — even when payouts are in local currency — is denominated in US dollars. In a week when the US is about to impose sweeping tariffs and the DBS-Bank of China RMB deal signals attention shifting east, the question of whether stablecoin rails reinforce dollar hegemony or merely provide operational convenience is one Southeast Asian regulators have not yet had to answer directly. That conversation is coming.

Singapore’s Digital Banks Cross the Wealth Threshold
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Two digital banking data points from this week belong together. MariBank — Sea Group’s digital bank — launched Mari Invest Singapore Equity, offering access to Singapore-listed equities from S$1 with no transaction fees, under MAS’s S$6.5 billion Equity Market Development Programme. One in three MariBank customers already holds at least one of its investment products.

Revolut Singapore confirmed its second consecutive year of net profitability. Subscription revenue grew 75 percent; business account balances grew more than sixfold; domestic transactions now represent nearly half of total activity — a significant shift for what started as a travel money card. The company nearly doubled its headcount and is targeting more than 300 employees locally within three years.

The pattern is phase transition, not product launches. Singapore’s digital banks — MariBank, Revolut, GXS — have survived the first cut and are now competing for the same layer of the consumer wallet that incumbent banks have historically owned: savings, wealth, and investment. The S$1 entry point and Revolut’s robo-advisor are both premised on the same thesis: there is a large, underserved segment of Singaporean and expatriate consumers with adequate saving capacity but insufficient access to the wealth management layer. They are probably right. Whether Singapore’s equity market proves compelling for that capital as April volatility arrives is a separate question.

The Week’s Underlying Logic
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Vietnam arrests the crypto founders the same week its licensed exchange framework advances. Grab resolves its governance question the day before announcing a US$400 million capital return. Singapore’s biggest bank deepens its RMB infrastructure relationship five days before the US announces its most significant tariff package in a generation. Stablecoin settlement infrastructure assembles itself quietly across three separate announcements.

None of these events is isolated. Together, they describe a week in which several of Southeast Asia’s most important financial actors made moves that look tactical in isolation and strategic in sequence. The pattern is consistent with what I’ve been tracking since January: the region is positioning infrastructure for ownership — of which lanes, which currencies, which settlement rails, which user assets. Who controls the clearing layer controls the economics.

That question is about to get more interesting. April 2 tariffs will test whether dollar-denominated financial infrastructure remains the default for Southeast Asian cross-border commerce. Vietnam’s licensed exchanges need to be operational before the government can enforce the offshore trading ban — the timeline pressure means the ONUS arrests may not be the last in this particular story. And the stablecoin settlement layer taking shape in Singapore is assembling faster than any regulatory framework has been written to govern it.

The field is being cleared. The question is who plants the next crop.

References
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This article was created using artificial intelligence technology. While we strive for accuracy and provide valuable insights, readers should independently verify information and use their own judgment when making business decisions. The content may not reflect real-time market conditions or personal circumstances.

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#Southeast Asia #Vietnam #crypto regulation #stablecoins #Grab #cross-border payments