The World Trade Organization released a new study this week on stablecoins in world trade. Juan Marchetti, the WTO's director of trade in services and investment, framed the finding at the Geneva launch in a way that should concentrate the attention of every regulator still on the sidelines: stablecoins account for only 3% of global cross-border payments, and the technology isn't why.

"The constraint is not technology. It is actually regulation and the lack of development of regulatory frameworks," Marchetti said.

The Numbers, and Their Limits

Stablecoin volume in cross-border payments grew roughly 35-fold between 2020 and mid-2024. That figure is worth a caveat before it's used as evidence: it measures total cross-border stablecoin flow, which includes speculative trading and corporate treasury movement alongside remittances and trade settlement. It shows the rails scaling. It doesn't by itself prove remittance-specific adoption grew at the same rate, and this piece shouldn't imply otherwise.

What is better established is the regulatory gap. The Financial Stability Board's October 2025 review found most jurisdictions still lack finalized frameworks for crypto-asset and stablecoin activity, a gap wide enough that the WTO used it to argue regulation, not technology, is the binding constraint. The exact figures cited in WTO reporting on this point don't fully reconcile with the FSB's own published review, which surveyed 37 jurisdictions and reported 11 with finalized general crypto-asset frameworks against only 5 with finalized stablecoin-specific frameworks. Either way the direction is the same: a small minority of jurisdictions have done this work. That's the number that matters for policy, and it should be sourced to the FSB report directly.

For the Philippines, the two channels where this bites are OFW remittances and SME trade finance. That's where transaction cost, settlement speed, and FX friction show up first, and where any regulatory fix would be felt first too.

The Philippine Angle

Marchetti's sharpest point: developing economies have the most to gain from stablecoin adoption because they pay the highest remittance costs, and they tend to have the least developed regulatory infrastructure to capture that upside. That contradiction is a risk the Philippines must manage deliberately.

The remittance cost problem is real. Sending USD 200 to the Philippines still costs migrants roughly 5 to 6% on average, nearly double the UN's 3% target, per World Bank corridor-level pricing data cited by the Overseas Workers Welfare Administration. Against USD 38 billion a year in personal remittances, that's not a rounding error.

Whether stablecoins actually close that gap is a live question, not a settled one. A Bank of Italy mystery-shopping study released in August 2026 sent USDC across ten real-world remittance corridors and found no systematic cost advantage over traditional operators: total costs ranged from 0.3% to nearly 9%, and stablecoins beat Wise on three corridors while losing on four others. The on-chain transfer itself averaged just 0.4%. The expense sits almost entirely in the on-ramp, the off-ramp, KYC, and the fiat conversion on both ends — the layer of intermediaries that regulation and interoperability standards, not blockchain technology, actually govern.

That finding cuts toward the piece's argument rather than against it. If the savings are getting absorbed by fragmented, unlicensed, or redundant on/off-ramp infrastructure, the fix is exactly the kind of regulatory and interoperability work the WTO study is calling for, not a reason to wait for the technology to mature on its own.

On regulation, the Philippines has a real head start over most of the jurisdictions in the FSB's review. The BSP built out a VASP licensing regime early and already has licensed players operating under it. That framework has been running under an indefinite moratorium on new VASP licenses since 2022, extended again in August 2025, citing consumer protection and financial stability risk. That's a defensible prudential stance, not an obviously wrong one, and the FSB's own findings show most of the world is moving cautiously too. The gap is narrower than "moving versus not moving": the moratorium freezes new entrants, but nothing in it prevents the BSP from using the pause to write stablecoin-specific rules for the licensees it already supervises. That's the distinction this piece holds onto. The existing licensed base is an asset. A moratorium on new licenses is not the same thing as a stablecoin framework, and treating the two as equivalent understates what's actually missing.

Private-sector infrastructure is moving regardless. Mastercard is piloting stablecoin identity and trust verification through Crypto Credential. Western Union has partnered with a stablecoin infrastructure provider to launch a dollar-backed wallet and card, live in 37 markets and expanding past 60 by year-end. It's worth being precise about where BSP leverage actually sits: the BSP controls who can legally operate as a VASP inside the Philippines, and that licensing authority is real leverage over domestic on/off-ramps. What it doesn't reach is the sender side of the corridor — platforms operating in the US, UAE, Singapore, and other OFW-origin markets that never need a Philippine license to shape how money enters the corridor in the first place. If Philippine regulators don't build stablecoin-specific rules and interoperability standards for the domestic end, the terms of the corridor still get set upstream, just not by anyone the BSP licenses.

What "Fast Enough" Looks Like

Regulatory clarity is not a brake on stablecoin adoption. It is the precondition for it. As Marchetti put it: "Contribution to trade will depend far less on the technology than on regulatory convergence, interoperability and the surrounding financial infrastructure, especially in developing economies that stand to gain."

Concretely, for the Philippines that means three things: a stablecoin-specific circular that updates Circular 1108 rather than treating stablecoins as a subset of general VASP activity, interoperability and travel-rule standards for licensed on/off-ramps serving the remittance corridor, and a defined path for stablecoin licensing that doesn't sit frozen inside the broader VASP moratorium. Absent those three, the existing licensed base is a head start that goes nowhere. BPAP intends to stay engaged on that work, from regulatory convergence discussions to practical pilot frameworks for the remittance corridor.

References