Singapore's crypto volume added $101bn, and institutions supplied $29bn of it

Chainalysis put Singapore crypto activity at $284 billion for the year to June 2026, up 55.4%, while the wider Central and Southeast Asia and Oceania region shrank 6.8%. The report credits institutional platforms for much of that growth. Run the two percentages back into dollars and the split comes out differently.

Five numbers from the report

• Singapore: $284bn, up 55.4%, against a regional economy down 6.8%
• Institutional platform activity: $60bn, up 94%, which is 21.1% of the country's total
• Back out the growth and the market added $101bn, of which institutions supplied $29bn, or 28.7%
• Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam: 5.4 million transfers under $10,000, which is 14.4% of the world's total from 2.5% of the world's crypto economy
• The average domestic P2P transfer across those three is $618, against $1,210 across the rest of the world

Institutional desks grew faster than anything else and still account for under a third of what was added. The other $72bn came from the rest of the market. The institutional segment is also the part Chainalysis describes with the least enthusiasm.

“The growth in Singapore's institutional platform ecosystem was very concentrated and marked by mostly high-volume activity by existing platforms rather than the dynamic entry of new services.”

— Chainalysis, Comment to Cointelegraph

Chainalysis, to Cointelegraph

That describes existing desks doing more volume, and it has a regulatory cause. In 2025 the Monetary Authority of Singapore told local firms serving overseas clients to get a licence or leave. StraitsX chief executive Tianwei Liu said the rule stripped out speculative activity and left more banks and large companies running blockchain in production. Joining that narrow field costs time: Gemini waited 23 months between its in-principle approval and its Major Payment Institution licence.

MAS has been building the other side at the same time. Its BLOOM programme runs trials with regulated stablecoins and tokenised bank money, and Ripple joined on 25 March to test cross-border trade settlement with RLUSD.

Three countries are running the opposite experiment

The Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam make 14.4% of the world's small P2P transfers while holding 2.5% of the global crypto economy, which is 5.8 times the share their market size would predict. More than four in five of their domestic transfers fall under $1,000.

Remittances explain it. World Bank figures put personal remittances at 8.5% of Philippine GDP in 2025, and PDAX founder Nichel Gaba estimates that 5% to 10% of inbound remittances now settle in stablecoins. Multiply those and stablecoin settlement already carries between 0.4% and 0.85% of the country's GDP. The Bank of the Philippine Islands started a pilot in July aimed at freelancers paid from abroad.

Vietnam's driver is the currency itself. The dong is not widely supported in direct trading pairs, so P2P is the fiat gateway, and Reuters reported in March that most Vietnamese traders use overseas exchanges. Thailand's regulator flagged a sharp rise in stablecoin volume in September, USDT in particular. Domestic stablecoin markets run to $10.4bn in Thailand and $6.9bn in Vietnam, and across every market Chainalysis analysed, cross-border stablecoin activity came in 3.2 times larger than domestic.

Two crypto economies sit inside one regional report. Singapore's runs deep and narrow, through a handful of desks that were already licensed. The other runs wide and shallow, through millions of people moving $618 at a time because the bank rail costs more. A headline growth number catches the first and misses the second, which is the one moving wages between countries.

Informational material, not investment advice. The figures come from Chainalysis for the year ended June 2026.