Coins.ph’s Plan to Turn Stablecoins into Pocket Money

By Sean Murphy, Editor-in-Chief at FinanceX Magazine

Pressed on what Coins.ph’s new QR-for-crypto product is really trying to solve, Amira Alawi, Coins.ph’s Global Marketing Director, keeps coming back to a single image: a Filipino grandmother paying for her groceries with stablecoins as easily as she does with cash. It is not a marketing slogan so much as a design test. Can she scan a QR code at her local sari-sari store and barely notice the difference from cash?

Coins.ph, is the largest crypto exchange and one of the fastest growing wallets in the Philippines for years, with over 18 million registered users and multiple licenses from the Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas. The trading layer, Alawi suggests, was always the easier piece. The more interesting work is reframing crypto from something Filipinos buy and hold into something they spend.

We want to push that you can actually use crypto,” she says. “It starts with stablecoins, and with using it every day. You can trade, you can send money, everything lives

in one app.”

The model Coins.ph is reaching for is the Asian super-app, the WeChat template, where trading, payments, remitt ances and bill pay sit inside a single interface and stablecoins act as the invisible plumbing between them. In a country where roughly half of adults remain unbanked or underbanked, the case for that approach is fairly intuitive. Asking a small merchant in Cebu to open a current account is friction; asking her to scan a QR code and accept a stablecoin denominated in pesos or dollars is, in theory, easier.

The merchant infrastructure is already there. Coins.ph rides on rails that the Bangko Sentral built for interbank QR payments, with nearly 700,000 QRPh-enabled merchants now active across the country. The new product layers stablecoin acceptance onto that existing footprint. Settlement in seconds, fees that compress against credit cards and remitt ance providers, and a unit of account that does not move while the transaction is processing.

At the heart of that pitch sits PHPC, Coins.ph’s own peso-pegged stablecoin, which exited the Bangko Sentral’s regulatory sandbox in 2025 after hitting the central bank’s pilot targets within two months, and is awaiting fi nal permits from the regulator. PHPC is the unit of account that is supposed to support the rest of the architecture, a peso-denominated digital token issued under BSP supervision and designed to move at the speed of crypto rather than the speed of legacy banking.

Coins.ph is also among the early participants in Circle’s Payments Network, which connects the Philippine peso into a broader global stablecoin clearing layer. The infrastructure is being built less for traders than for a domestic payments economy that already runs on QR codes.

What makes the bet less ambitious than it might sound is that Filipinos already pay this way. GCash and Maya, the country’s two dominant e-wallets, have spent the bett er part of a decade training tens of millions of users to scan, tap and confirm. Coins.ph is not asking the consumers to learn a new way to make payments, only to do the same thing with a different kind of money sitt ing underneath. The competitive question is whether stablecoin-backed QR payments can carve out a place inside that habit, and what they off er that fi at-backed alternatives do not.

Behind the consumer story sits a remitt ance one. The Philippines is among the largest remitt ance corridors in the world, with more than 10 million overseas Filipino workers wiring more than thirty-fi ve billion dollars home each year, much of it through providers whose fees stack at every step. Coins.ph has been quietly building partnerships with banks, remitt ance fi rms and institutional players to insert stablecoins into those flows, what Alawi calls the invisible rails of the system. For families on the receiving end the proposition is simple enough: more of the money the relative sent actually arrives, and it arrives in something they can immediately spend at the same QR codes they use for everything else.

About Coins.ph

Coins.ph operates internationally through Coins.xyz, with hubs in Mauritius, Thailand, Australia, Brazil, Nigeria and the European Union. Further licensing is being pursued in the Middle East and elsewhere, with US and Hong Kong access likely to come through partnerships rather than direct licensing given the cost. The Gulf is a logical next corridor given the size of the Filipino workforce there.

The ambition is to take the model abroad, beginning with the diaspora and expanding from there. Whether the company gets there will depend on a lot of things, but the grandmother test is a fair place to start. If she scans, taps and walks away with her shopping without thinking about it, the rest of the architecture has done its job.