Hashed Open Research Says Southeast Asia Is Emerging as a Key Arena for Digital Assets

Hashed’s policy think tank, Hashed Open Research, said July 27 that it had published “Institutions Born of Necessity: Choices and Realities of Digital Assets in Southeast Asia,” a report co-authored with SCBX, a Thai financial holding company. The report was based on Southeast Asia Blockchain Week 2026, held in Bangkok in May.

The report argues that Southeast Asia is emerging as a key market for the global digital-asset industry, centered on tokenized assets and stablecoins, digital assets pegged to fiat currencies. Rather than simply following financial models from the US and Europe, the region is building its own digital-finance ecosystem around practical local needs such as remittances, financial access and monetary sovereignty.

It added that tokenized assets, stablecoin payments and artificial intelligence-based financial services are already being deployed in the market, making Southeast Asia a real-world stage for the global digital-asset industry.

Digital-asset strategies across the region are splitting along clear lines. Singapore, Thailand and Malaysia are accelerating the development of local-currency stablecoins and tokenized financial markets. Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines, by contrast, are focused on bringing privately led digital-asset markets into the regulatory system and curbing the spread of dollarization.

Hashed Open Research said countries across Southeast Asia are also moving quickly to formulate tokenization strategies, one of the industry’s hottest topics recently. The report cited Malaysia’s tokenization of sukuk, while Thailand and Singapore are pursuing tokenization involving Kyobo Securities and wine-based real-world assets. Each country is developing its own tokenization strategy based on local demand.

Hashed Chief Executive Officer Kim Seo-jun said agent-to-agent, or A2A, commerce, in which machines and software carry out transactions without human intervention, could grow into an independent economic sector comparable in scale to B2B and B2C.

Kim Ho-jin, chief executive officer of ShardLab, said Southeast Asia is not simply a market with high traffic or large user bases, but a hub of value creation. He added that the region is rapidly shifting from a customer-centered market to one led by developers and entrepreneurs.