Stablecoins are eating up cross-border payments, and a Hong Kong-listed company has laid the pipeline.

In 2025, the total market value of the global stablecoin market will exceed US$230 billion, and the scale of on-chain transfers will exceed the traditional payment giant PayPal. But the truly noteworthy changes are not on-chain, but off-chain:Stablecoins are changing from an internal tool for crypto transactions to an infrastructure for corporate cross-border payments.

This transformation is happening faster than most people imagine.

OSL Group (863.HK), a digital asset platform listed on the Main Board of the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, will see its core operating income increase by 150.1% year-on-year in 2025, reaching HK$534 million. The total transaction volume of the platform exceeded HK$201.2 billion, tripling year-on-year. But the most critical numbers are hidden in the structure: Stablecoin trading volume accounts for 60% of platform transaction-related trading volume, and overseas revenue accounts for 67%.

In other words, more than half of this company's business is no longer helping people speculate in Bitcoin, but helping companies move money using stablecoins.

This is not the story of an exchange. This is a company that is using compliance licenses and stable currency payments to rebuild global capital flow channels.

Stable currency payment: not a transfer, but a reconstruction pipeline

Stablecoins have been in the crypto market for seven or eight years, and most of the time they do the same thing: act as a lubricant between trading pairs. You sell ETH, receive USDT, and buy BTC. It is the base currency of the exchange and a substitute for the US dollar in the on-chain world.

But starting in 2024, things began to change. More and more companies are discovering that stablecoins are far more efficient in payments and cross-border settlements than traditional banking channels. The reason is not complicated: a cross-border remittance in the SWIFT system takes an average of 1 to 5 working days, with high handling fees and incomplete coverage. Especially in emerging markets, a payment from Hong Kong to Nigeria may have to go through three or four intermediary banks, and every time it passes, a layer of skin is peeled off.

The advantages of stablecoins are straightforward: they are available 24 hours a day, arrive in your account within a few minutes, and the cost is almost negligible. For those small and medium-sized enterprises that have to handle a large number of cross-border receipts and payments every quarter, this is not a technical belief, but a real savings.

But the problem is that there is a huge gap between "a USDT is transferred on the chain" and "the enterprise actually completes a compliant cross-border payment." You need compliant stablecoins, legal currency deposit and withdrawal channels, access to local payment networks, multi-currency exchange capabilities, and most importantly - a license recognized by regulatory agencies.

This is exactly what OSL is doing.

In February 2026, OSL launched the enterprise-level USD stable currency USDGO, which was issued by Anchorage Digital, the first crypto bank in the United States to obtain a federal charter. It is supervised by the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC), and its reserves are mainly U.S. Treasury bonds and cash. This is not another "I also want to issue stablecoins" following the trend. USDGO is following the route of U.S. federally regulated issuance + Asian compliant distribution. The goal is very clear: Give corporate customers a stable currency that they dare to use.

But coins alone are not enough. OSL BizPay is a one-stop stablecoin payment solution for enterprises, allowing merchants to accept encrypted payments and settle directly into local legal currency. StableHub is the hub for stablecoin exchange, supporting high-speed conversion between different stablecoins and legal currencies. Coupled with the acquisition of Banxa, a Web3 payment infrastructure provider with extensive payment licenses in North America, Europe, the United Kingdom and Australia, which was completed in January 2026, OSL has made up for the last mile of legal currency access in one go.

To put it bluntly, OSL is not a product, but a complete pipeline from the chain to the bank account. USDGO is the water in the pipe, BizPay is the faucet on the enterprise side, StableHub is the dispatch station in the middle, and Banxa is the interface to the global banking system.

This also explains why the payment business can become the core engine of OSL's full-year growth in 2025. Stablecoin trading volume accounting for 60% is not an accident, but a signal that the pipeline system is beginning to run smoothly.

Why organizations choose OSL: Compliance is the most expensive ticket

Some people may ask: OSL is not the only one doing stablecoin payment, so why do institutions choose it?

The answer is not because OSL fees are cheap, nor is it because it supports more currencies. On the contrary, OSL currently only supports BTC and ETH transactions on the retail side, and the choice is extremely restrained.

The real reason why organizations choose OSL is just two words: compliance.

In December 2020, OSL became the first digital asset platform in Hong Kong to obtain Type 1 and Type 7 licenses from the Securities and Futures Commission (SFC). In 2023, after Hong Kong implemented a new virtual asset trading platform regulatory system, OSL obtained the AMLO VASP license and became the first platform approved to provide services to retail investors. As of early 2026, the Group has obtained more than 50 licenses and registrations in more than 11 jurisdictions around the world.

The value of these licenses lies not in the paper but in the operational details. According to SFC regulations, OSL must store 98% of customer assets in cold wallets, with hot wallets accounting for no more than 2%. Data for 2024 shows that OSL’s custody solution in Hong Kong has an insurance limit of up to US$1 billion. More importantly, customer assets are held in trust through wholly-owned subsidiaries and are completely legally separated from the platform’s own assets. Even if the platform goes bankrupt and is liquidated, customer assets are not within the scope of liquidation.

For institutions managing billions of dollars, these are not plus points, they are the bottom line.

This is why when the Hong Kong virtual asset spot ETF was launched, OSL won about 64% of the custody and trading share. When traditional public funds such as Boshi and Huaxia choose a digital asset custodian, their first consideration is always "Is it safe to leave your money with you". OSL answered this question with SOC 2 Type 2 certification, bankruptcy isolation trust and $1 billion insurance line.

In 2025, OSL further became the sole custody and trading platform for Asia's first Solana spot ETF. In the same year, it also sold Asia's first retail tokenized fund - ChinaAMC Hong Kong Dollar Digital Currency Market Fund. In the same year, OSL also completed US$300 million in equity financing, setting a record for the largest equity financing in the digital asset industry in Asia at that time, excluding the Indian and Japanese markets. In 2026, the company completed another US$200 million in equity financing. These two capital market actions not only filled the company with sufficient ammunition to expand its international compliance payment business, but also further enriched the company's strategic long-term shareholder base, which is evident in the favor of institutional investors.

Compliance is not a cost, it is a moat. In an industry where even large offshore exchanges may have their assets frozen overnight, each of the more than 50 licenses in the hands of OSL is a barrier built up with time and money. If latecomers want to copy it, the license application process alone will take several years.

OSL's executives all have rich industry experience. Their resumes include Google, Morgan Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and operational management experience in many digital asset platforms and projects, giving the company the unique advantage of having both Web3 genes and understanding of traditional finance. OSL's current transformation and upgrade positioning as "Global Stablecoin Payment and Trading Platform" is not just a marketing rhetoric, but a real revenue structure in the 2025 financial report.

The other side of the coin

Of course, telling the OSL story too smoothly would be untrue.

In fiscal year 2025, OSL had a net loss of HK$388 million. The profit for the same period last year was HK$54.8 million. From a numerical perspective, this is a rather eye-catching reversal.

But broken down, the main components of this loss are: human and IT investment in global expansion, integration costs of Banxa acquisition, license application fees in multiple jurisdictions, and fluctuations in the fair value of the digital assets held. Many of these are one-time expenses. This time is not a passive blood loss, but an "active choice" to accurately follow the macro cycle.

Hitting record revenue while widening losses is not unusual for high-growth technology companies. The real question is: Can these investments achieve economies of scale?

The market seems to be giving initial positive signals. Total revenue in 2025 will be HK$489 million, a year-on-year increase of 30.4%. Core operating income was HK$534 million, an increase of 150.1%. The platform transaction volume tripled to HK$201.2 billion. Foreign revenue jumped from almost zero to 67%. These data show that expansion money is indeed spent where it can generate revenue.

It is worth mentioning that OSL adopts the net method in revenue recognition, recording only the actual spread and commission earned, rather than counting transaction flow as revenue. This means that its revenue of HK$489 million is more valuable than some peers that use the gross method to calculate it.

In Hong Kong, OSL’s most direct benchmark was HashKey. The battle between the two is quite interesting: OSL is taking the "compliant infrastructure provider" route, making money by relying on licenses, payment networks and institutional services, with a low-key and restrained style. HashKey is more like a "traffic ecology" model. It issued the ecological token HSK, built a public chain, and the community interacted frequently. HashKey's total annual transaction volume in 2025 reached HK$590.8 billion, but its net loss during the same period reached HK$1.087 billion.

Now, the development of the two has begun to decouple. HashKey still adheres to the native finance on the chain, is stationed in Hong Kong, and is betting on the encryption ecology. However, it is expected to face the dual challenges of market fluctuations and competition in the industry. OSL has chosen to fully focus on internationalization, betting on the compliant stablecoin ecosystem, walking on two legs of payment and transactions, connecting Web2 and Web3, hoping to try its best to escape the influence of market fluctuations, but the upper limit of development will be affected by factors such as international regulatory policies and the implementation of the stablecoin ecosystem.

Which of the two routes can outperform, it is too early to draw a conclusion now. But one thing is certain: In the direction of stablecoin payment, the results of institutional customers voting with their feet currently point to compliance first.

Summary

The competition for stablecoin payments has just begun.

The global regulatory framework is still taking shape, and corporate needs are still being released. Whoever can do these three things well at the same time: compliance, products, and global networks, will get the next biggest card. OSL is at least on the poker table.

Plumbing is not sexy. But every time money flows through it, it has to go through the pipe.