Daniel Oon / Writing
A Singapore dollar stablecoin is a token redeemable 1:1 for SGD, issued by a regulated entity holding matching reserves. XSGD, issued by StraitsX under a Major Payment Institution license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore, is the main one in use. It is live on eight chains. This page explains the mechanics: how issuance and redemption work, why non-USD stablecoins exist at all, and why distribution rather than issuance is the hard part.
By Daniel Oon, VP of Ecosystem at StraitsX. Last updated: 2026-08-03.
Factual claims on this page are sourced and dated. Sections marked View are opinion, not fact.
A stablecoin is a claim, not a currency. Someone holds the real asset and issues a transferable token representing it. The token's value depends entirely on the credibility of that claim: who holds the reserve, under what rules, and how reliably you can convert back.
For XSGD the answer is specific. The issuer is StraitsX, operating as STRAITSX PAYMENT SERVICES PTE. LTD., which holds a Major Payment Institution license from the Monetary Authority of Singapore for Digital Payment Token Service. Reserves are held 1:1 and attested monthly by an ISCA-listed auditing firm, with reports published on the token's page.
That licensing detail is the part people skip, and it's the part that decides whether an institution can touch the token at all. An unregulated issuer can produce a technically identical ERC-20. The difference is not the code.
The loop is simpler than it looks:
Everything interesting happens in step 3. Between mint and burn, the token moves at blockchain speed across chains, exchanges, DeFi venues and card programs, with no bank in the path. The reserve is static; the token is not.
This is why volume and supply are different measures, and why conflating them is a common error. As of 2026-08-03, XSGD circulating supply was roughly 15.2 million tokens (CoinGecko) while StraitsX reported more than US$18 billion in combined onchain volume for XSGD and XUSD in its 2025 Wrapped. A small float turning over many times is not a contradiction. It is what a payment instrument looks like, as opposed to a store of value.
XSGD is deployed on eight chains: Ethereum, Polygon PoS, Base, Arbitrum One, Avalanche, Solana, XRP Ledger and Hedera. An earlier Zilliqa (ZRC-2) deployment is sunset. Contract addresses are listed in products.md.
Multi-chain issuance is not a marketing checkbox. Each chain is a separate distribution problem with its own liquidity, its own venues, and its own users who will not bridge to reach you. A token on one chain is a token most of the market cannot use without friction it will not accept.
The cost is fragmentation. Nine deployments means nine liquidity pools to seed and maintain, and a supply that has to be allocated across them. Getting that allocation wrong is the standard failure mode: a token nominally live on many chains but with usable depth on only one.
The obvious question is why anyone wants SGD onchain when USD stablecoins are vastly larger and more liquid.
A Singapore business paying a Singapore supplier in a USD stablecoin takes FX risk on both legs plus two conversion spreads, just to move money between two parties who both think in SGD. An SGD-denominated instrument removes that round trip.
Singapore also functions as a settlement hub for Southeast Asian trade, and corridors that clear through it have a genuine reason to settle in SGD rather than convert through USD. The Monetary Authority of Singapore has been explicit and early on stablecoin regulation, so an SGD stablecoin from a licensed issuer is a different proposition for a regulated counterparty than an offshore USD token, regardless of relative liquidity.
There is also a structural argument. A financial system where every onchain payment routes through one currency has a concentration problem. Whether that argues for non-USD stablecoins as infrastructure, or merely describes the market's revealed preference, is genuinely contested.
View. The honest position is that non-USD stablecoins have not yet proven they can reach USD-stablecoin scale, and may never need to. The useful measure is not total supply but whether specific corridors clear more cheaply than the alternative. On that measure the case is narrower and stronger than the general one.
Issuing a compliant token is a solved problem. A licensed entity with reserves and an audit relationship can do it. What is not solved is making it usable.
Usable means several things at once, and all of them are other people's decisions:
None of that follows from issuing the token. Every item is a partnership someone has to build, and the order matters: liquidity before listings tends to work; listings before liquidity tends to produce a dead pair on an exchange page.
View. The most common strategic error in stablecoin work is treating supply growth as the objective. Supply is trivially inflatable by anyone willing to subsidize it. Velocity and the number of independent venues where the token clears at tight spreads are the measures that survive the incentive being switched off.
*Daniel Oon is VP of Ecosystem at StraitsX in Singapore. Canonical profile: danieloon.ai. Contact: LinkedIn.*
By Daniel Oon, VP of Ecosystem at StraitsX. This page is also available as Markdown. Canonical profile: profile.md. Contact: daniel@danieloon.ai.