Kenanga launched Malaysia's first tokenised money market funds on Stellar in February 2026. That is the shape of every deal worth chasing in this region: a regulated institution, a live regulator track, and volume that keeps settling after the press release. Below: the competitive map, a market-by-market plan for the five hubs, each JD duty mapped to a plan, and the tool I built to qualify partners.
APAC buys infrastructure on three tests: is it regulated where I am, does it settle cheaply at scale, and who is in the room when it breaks. Stellar passes the first two on paper and loses on the third, because almost nobody senior is physically in these markets. So the BD plan is not five identical playbooks. Singapore is an institutional-settlement market, Hong Kong is a licensing market, Malaysia is a live reference account and a Shariah-tokenization opening, Japan is a partner-led market, Australia is a payments-corridor market. This page maps the competition, the plan per hub, every JD duty, and the first 90 days.
SDF built a regional market development team in 2026 with senior leads in LATAM, Brazil, Europe, Africa, the Middle East and APAC, on the premise that institutions make integration decisions locally. APAC sits with Betty Sun-Lucas in Singapore. This BD role is the second seat in the region, and the JD is explicit that the two run in lockstep. That structure tells you what SDF learned: regional presence without a pipeline owner produces conversations, not integrations.
An APAC bank or PSP evaluating a settlement rail in 2026 has a crowded shortlist. Knowing the specific gap in each rival is what makes a first meeting productive.
| Rail | Strength in APAC | Gap vs Stellar | Posture |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ripple / XRPL | The closest comparable. Deep Japan position through SBI Ripple Asia, HashKey DX in Hong Kong, RLUSD, custody via Metaco, XRP Tokyo 2026 drew 3,000+ attendees. | A commercial company selling its own stack, so a bank partnering with Ripple partners with a vendor. SDF is a non-profit maintaining neutral public infrastructure, which is an easier internal approval at an institution that fears vendor lock-in. | head-on |
| Tron | Largest USDT float, real retail remittance usage across Southeast Asia. | Retail and grey-market association makes it unusable for a licensed institution. Not in the same buying conversation. | different buyer |
| Ethereum L2s (Base, Arbitrum) | Deepest stablecoin float and developer mindshare, default choice for a crypto-native team. | Fee variance and multi-hop bridging make per-transaction cost hard to underwrite for a payments business. Stellar's fixed sub-cent fee and built-in path payments are the pitch. | coexist |
| Solana | Fast, cheap, strong retail and consumer-fintech story. | A different asset-control model rather than an absent one: Solana's Token-2022 extensions cover confidential transfers, transfer hooks and a permanent delegate. Stellar's controls are native to the base protocol (authorisation flags, clawback, trustlines) rather than opt-in extensions, which is an easier story for an issuer's compliance review. Argue the integration path and the licensed ramp network, not a capability gap. | coexist |
| Tempo (Stripe, Paradigm) | Mainnet live 18 March 2026, no native token, fees payable in any USD stablecoin, Stripe's merchant distribution. | New chain, thin regulated-asset track record, and it arrives with Stripe's commercial interests attached. Stellar's answer is twelve years of uptime and existing licensed anchors. | watch closely |
| Circle Arc | USDC as gas, Circle's issuer distribution and a strong compliance narrative. | Public testnet is live as of August 2026 with the mainnet phases still ahead, and it competes with Circle's own multi-chain USDC strategy. USDC is already native on Stellar, so this is a partner relationship to protect as much as a rival. | partner and rival |
| Aptos, Avalanche | Real institutional tokenization traction. Aptos has passed $1.2B in RWAs with tZERO and Archax issuance integrations and Franklin Templeton and BlackRock products present; Avalanche runs bank tokenization pilots. | Both are issuance venues more than payment networks: smaller settled payment volume and far fewer licensed on and off ramps in APAC. Stellar competes on the anchor network and the ramp, not on throughput slides. | selective |
| Permissioned rails (Canton, Kinexys, Partior) | Bank-owned and bank-comfortable, already inside the institutions this role targets. | Closed membership, so they cannot reach the fintech, wallet and remittance long tail. The realistic pitch is coexistence: permissioned for interbank legs, Stellar for the last mile to consumers and SMEs. | complement |
Every rival is either a company with its own book of business, a general-purpose chain that treats payments as one use case, or a closed consortium. Stellar is a twelve-year-old public network run by a non-profit, purpose-built for issuing and moving regulated value, with a licensed anchor network already in place. For a compliance committee, neutrality is the feature. The CEO's own framing of the network, "boring is a feature", is exactly the right register for this region.
The JD asks for a playbook adapted by market need and regulatory expectation. Five markets, five different jobs.
| Market | Regulatory state, 2026 | What this market is | The wedge I would run |
|---|---|---|---|
| Singapore | MAS Single-Currency Stablecoin framework; Project BLOOM piloting cross-border settlement on tokenised bank liabilities, first corridor Thailand to Singapore. | Institutional settlement and the regional HQ for everyone else's APAC team. | Deepen Marketnode. An SGX and Temasek venture backed by Euroclear and HSBC is the highest-credibility logo in the region. Convert the infrastructure work into named live issuances, then use it as the reference that opens DBS and OCBC. Push for a Project BLOOM adjacent corridor pilot where Stellar carries the last mile. |
| Hong Kong | Stablecoins Ordinance in force since 1 August 2025; the HKMA granted its first two issuer licences in April 2026; HSBC targeting an HKD-referenced stablecoin in H2 2026. | A licensing market. Issuance is the product being sold here. | Be the default issuance venue for newly licensed HKD stablecoin issuers. The pitch is asset authorisation flags, clawback, trustlines and Confidential Tokens, which map to what the HKMA regime demands. Second lane: licensed digital-asset platforms needing cheap settlement between HKD and USD stablecoins. |
| Malaysia | SC Malaysia digital-asset guidelines; BNM Digital Asset Innovation Hub running three ringgit stablecoin and tokenised deposit pilots, with Shariah considerations explicitly in scope and policy clarity promised by end-2026. | The live reference account, and the most underrated market on the list. Detailed at ★. | Expand Kenanga from two funds to a fund-tokenization pipeline, then take the reference to the DAIH participants and to the rest of the asset-management industry. Build the Shariah-tokenization wedge on the back of the live Kenanga reference. |
| Japan | FSA fund-transfer-service route; JPYC live since October 2025; MUFG, SMBC and Mizuho agreed in June 2026 to prepare a joint yen stablecoin, targeting issuance by March 2027 on Progmat infrastructure. | A partner-led market with the region's clearest rules and the highest barrier to a foreign newcomer. The megabank stablecoin is a dated watch item rather than a live product. | Do not attempt a direct assault. Partner into it: a Japanese systems integrator or a licensed issuer as the local face, plus SDF as neutral infrastructure. Japan Fintech Week, which ran 24 February to 6 March in 2026, is the annual moment, and the Kenanga launch was unveiled during it. Be honest internally that this market needs Japanese-language coverage that I would source rather than personally provide. |
| Australia | Treasury digital-asset platform reforms in progress; bank appetite is conservative and corridor-driven. | A payments-corridor market: AU to Southeast Asia and AU to the Pacific islands remittances. | Lead with corridor economics rather than tokenization. The RBA put the average cost of sending money from Australia to the South Pacific at roughly 6.4%, against about 2.5% to Australia's other destinations and a G20 target of 3%. That gap is a financial-inclusion story that lands with both regulators and a bank's own public commitments. Target the remittance operators and PSPs first, use them as the proof that reaches CBA. |
Roughly 40% Singapore and Malaysia, where there is live proof to compound. 25% Hong Kong, where licensing creates a dated window. 20% Australia, where corridors close faster than tokenization. 15% Japan, partner-led and patient.
Retail exchange listings, consumer wallet volume that does not settle on Stellar, and unlicensed offshore issuers. They add noise to the pipeline and cost credibility with the regulators this role has to sit in front of.
Indonesia, Vietnam and the Philippines are where the volume actually lives, and where the Rise In hackathon already put SDF on the ground. I would run them as builder and anchor markets fed from the KL and Singapore base rather than as separate hubs.
Stellar's flagship APAC institutional deployment is in Malaysia. Kenanga Group launched the market's first tokenised money market funds through its Myrra platform in February 2026, tokenising the Kenanga Money Market Fund and the Kenanga Islamic Money Market Fund, with each token carrying the same legal and economic rights as a traditional unit. The Malaysian tokenised-asset opportunity has been put at US$43 billion by 2030. Most BD plans would treat that as a case study. It is a pipeline.
Kenanga's Islamic money market fund is, as far as public records show, the first tokenised Shariah-compliant fund of its kind in Malaysia, and it settles on Stellar. Bank Negara has stated that Shariah considerations are in scope for its Digital Asset Innovation Hub pilots. Malaysia leads the global Islamic capital market: the largest sukuk market by issuance share, first in the ICD-LSEG Islamic Finance Development Indicator for thirteen consecutive years, and an Islamic capital market worth about RM2.7 trillion, roughly 64% of the national capital market.
Islamic-finance tokenization is not a vacant category, and I would not claim a white space I have not mapped. What Stellar has that competitors do not is a live Malaysian Islamic fund reference. The work is to convert that into a repeatable wedge: a named Shariah adviser, a clear SC Malaysia path, custody and distribution answered, and evidence of issuer demand. The addressable set runs from Malaysian asset managers to the GCC, which is a natural handoff to SDF's Middle East lead. Sukuk tokenization is the obvious second product after money market funds.
BNM's Digital Asset Innovation Hub onboarded three pilots for 2026: a ringgit stablecoin for B2B settlement run by Standard Chartered Malaysia with Capital A, and tokenised deposits for payments from Maybank and from CIMB. All three are wholesale, all three are in a controlled environment, and BNM has said it will give clearer policy on ringgit stablecoins and tokenised deposits by end-2026.
Those three names are the Malaysian institutional pipeline, and there is a live Stellar deployment in the same market to reference. The pilots are meant to inform BNM's policy direction ahead of that guidance, so the window to be in the room for a ringgit-denominated product is while the testing is running.
| Move | What it is | Why it works from Malaysia |
|---|---|---|
| Expand the Kenanga account | From two funds to a fund-tokenization program, then to distribution: who can hold, trade and use the tokens, and what settles on Stellar after issuance. | Volume follows secondary use rather than issuance alone. An expansion that produces recurring settlement is usually higher leverage than another logo. |
| Build the Shariah wedge | A tokenised Shariah-compliant asset playbook built with a named Shariah advisory firm, covering money market funds, sukuk and Islamic deposits, with the SC Malaysia path and the custody and distribution questions answered up front. | Stellar already carries a live Malaysian Islamic fund, and the playbook travels from Malaysia to Indonesia and the GCC. |
| Work the DAIH cohort | Reach Standard Chartered Malaysia, Capital A, Maybank and CIMB as the wholesale-settlement rail their pilots eventually need to leave the sandbox on. | These are public, dated, named pilots with a policy deadline. That is a rare thing to be able to time outreach against. |
| Run KL as an ASEAN base | Kuala Lumpur is a two-hour reach to Singapore, Jakarta and Bangkok, and cheaper to run events from than Singapore. | The JD asks for owned roundtables in each hub city. A KL base makes the Southeast Asian half of that calendar cheap and frequent instead of quarterly and expensive. |
I live and work in Malaysia, and I read BNM and DOSM data feeds as part of a live product I run. The Malaysia lane on this page is the part I would be executing from week one rather than learning.
| JD duty | My plan | Detailed in |
|---|---|---|
| 1 · Own APAC BD, allocate effort across five hubs, adapt by market and regulation | A written allocation with a reason per market, reviewed quarterly against closed integrations rather than meetings held. My split is in §03. | §03 |
| 2 · Lead in-market execution, structured annual visits, full engagement program per hub | An annual calendar anchored on the fixed regional events, with each visit carrying a conference, an owned roundtable, institutional meetings and a regulator introduction, so one trip does four jobs. | §07 |
| 3 · Work hand-in-hand with the APAC Market Development Director | A clear seam: market development owns narrative, policy posture and ecosystem presence; BD owns named pipeline and closed integrations. Joint account plans on the top ten institutions, one shared pipeline view, weekly sync. | §05 |
| 4 · Build and close partnerships with fintechs, payment platforms, wallets, exchanges and builders, through to live integration and sustained volume | Qualify on live SEP and anchor readiness before pitching, using the tool in §09, which calls the endpoints rather than trusting the metadata. Carry deals to live integration, and hold myself to post-launch volume rather than signature date. | §05, §09 |
| 5 · Operate remotely while coordinating with centralised marketing, legal, integrations and product | A written handoff package per deal (scope, SEPs in play, legal posture, integration owner, launch date, volume target) so nothing waits on a timezone. GMT+8 with flexible hours for US overlap. | §05 |
| 6 · Develop institutional relationships across tier-1 banks, licensed platforms and payment majors | Proof alone does not open a tier-1 bank. Combine three things: a live in-market reference (Marketnode in Singapore, Kenanga in Malaysia), warm senior sponsorship into the account, and a regulator-safe framing. Then run a named account plan per institution with a mapped buying committee, an identified champion, and the procurement and legal path written down before the second meeting. | §03, §06 |
| 7 · Be the internal voice of APAC, influence product priorities | A monthly regional memo to product covering what the region asked for and could not get. My first three inputs: Shariah-compliant asset requirements, local-currency stablecoin issuance mechanics, and privacy expectations for institutional flows. | ★ |
| 8 · Rigorous pipeline discipline in HubSpot and Airtable | Stage definitions with exit criteria, integration status as a first-class field, and a weekly regional pipeline report anyone can read without asking me. I am HubSpot Revenue Operations certified and have built this exact discipline before. | §05 |
| 9 · Represent SDF at flagship events and own SDF's events in the region | Fewer, better, and tied to accounts. One owned roundtable per hub built around named account objectives, and sponsorship only where it buys a speaking slot, private meetings or a partner announcement. Events are the occasion; the closed meetings and the follow-up ownership are the work. | §07 |
| 10 · Partner with marketing on content and communications from market activity | Every closed integration ships with a press release, a partner quote and a builder-facing technical write-up. I write and present in English and Mandarin, which doubles the reach of the same launch across the region. | §06 |
Four segments, one funnel, and a definition of done that is live volume rather than a signed memorandum.
Licensed on and off ramps, remittance operators, payment platforms. The segment that produces settled volume fastest. Qualified on SEP readiness.
Distribution. They decide whether a user can hold a Stellar asset at all. Cheap to integrate, high leverage on the anchor segment.
Funds, tokenization platforms, stablecoin issuers. Slowest cycle, largest balances, and the segment where Stellar's compliance primitives win.
Tier-1 banks and market infrastructure. Reached through references from the first three segments, not through cold outreach.
HubSpot holds the deal, Airtable holds the integration and event state, and every stage has a written exit criterion so the pipeline reads the same to someone in San Francisco as it does to me in Kuala Lumpur. A regional pipeline anyone can read without asking me is the point. I am HubSpot Revenue Operations certified and have rebuilt a stalled intro to pilot to contract funnel this way before.
Each one is tied to a specific mechanic, a dated regulatory window, or a gap in a named competitor.
Marketnode and Kenanga are the only two things in the region that end an institutional meeting early. Build a written reference pack around each, with the counterparty's permission, and open every tier-1 bank conversation with the one in their own market.
Kenanga's Islamic money market fund is already on Stellar and BNM has Shariah considerations in scope for its pilots. Turn that reference into a playbook with a named Shariah adviser, a clear SC Malaysia path, and answers on custody and distribution, then run it from Malaysia to Indonesia and hand the GCC leg to SDF's Middle East lead.
The HKMA granted its first two stablecoin issuer licences in April 2026 and HSBC is targeting an HKD stablecoin in the second half. Newly licensed issuers choose their issuance venue once. Be in front of every licensee and applicant with the asset-control primitives their regime demands.
Most APAC payment firms that could be anchors have never published a stellar.toml, and some that did have endpoints that no longer answer. Checking first tells you whether the next conversation is commercial, technical, or a rescue. I built the tool for it (§09) rather than describing it.
The RBA puts Australia to South Pacific remittance costs at roughly 6.4% against about 2.5% to Australia's other destinations. That is a financial-inclusion argument that a bank's own public commitments already support, and it converts faster than an institutional tokenization pitch in a market that is still writing its rules.
Japan has the clearest rules and the highest barrier to a foreign newcomer. Recruit a licensed local issuer or systems integrator as the face, keep SDF as neutral infrastructure, and use Japan Fintech Week as the annual anchor. Be honest that this market needs Japanese-language coverage.
Institutions buy settlement, builders buy primitives. Stellar shipped an x402 agentic-payments spec and SDK in Q1 2026, which is the most interesting thing on the network for a Southeast Asian developer audience. Run it as the hook for hackathons and roundtables while the institutional track runs separately.
Against Ripple, Stripe's Tempo and Circle's Arc, the differentiator inside a bank's approval process is that SDF is a non-profit with no competing book of business. Say it plainly, early, to the risk committee rather than to the innovation team.
The JD calls for structured annual visits to each hub with a full engagement program. Built around the fixed points in the regional calendar, so each trip carries a conference, an owned roundtable, institutional meetings and a regulator introduction rather than one of the four.
| Window | Anchor event, 2026 dates | Hub visit | The owned program around it |
|---|---|---|---|
| Feb | Consensus Hong Kong, 10 to 12 February | Hong Kong | Licensed-issuer briefing on issuance primitives, meetings with HKMA licensees and applicants, and a builder meetup on x402. SDF announced its TopNod wallet partnership at this event, so the precedent for using it as a launch moment exists. |
| Late Feb to early Mar | Japan Fintech Week, 24 February to 6 March | Japan | Partner-led issuer roundtable, FSA-adjacent introductions through the local partner, and a joint announcement timed to the week. The Kenanga launch was unveiled during this window in 2026. |
| Apr | Money20/20 Asia, Bangkok, 21 to 23 April | Regional, not a hub | The payments-industry week rather than a crypto week: PSPs, remittance operators and acquirers in one place. Pair it with a Southeast Asia swing (Jakarta, Manila or Ho Chi Minh City) since the flight is already paid for. |
| Jun to Jul | Regional mid-year swing | Malaysia, then Indonesia | Kenanga expansion review, DAIH cohort meetings, a KL builder roundtable, and a Jakarta anchor day. Cheap and repeatable from a KL base. |
| Oct | Token2049 Singapore, 7 to 8 October | Singapore | The densest institutional week in APAC. Marketnode joint session, an invite-only tokenization roundtable, MAS-adjacent introductions, and the annual regional partner dinner. |
| Nov | Australian fintech season | Australia | Corridor-economics briefings with remittance operators and PSPs, then the bank meetings those references earn. Sydney and Melbourne in one block. |
Five structured hub visits, three fixed conferences plus a regional payments week, five owned roundtables, and the Philippines, Vietnam and Indonesia picked up from the Southeast Asian swings. Dates are the published 2026 ones and move year to year, so the structure is the commitment rather than the specific week.
A working web app that qualifies any company as a Stellar anchor in three passes. It fetches the domain's stellar.toml (SEP-1), then calls every endpoint that company declares to see which ones actually answer, then verifies the issued assets onchain against Horizon: does the issuing account exist, does its home_domain point back, which compliance flags are set, how many trustlines and how much supply.
Declared and working turn out to be different things, and that gap is the point. Two real results from the live ecosystem: anclap.com declares six standards and every endpoint answers, advertising ARS and PEN deposit and withdrawal, with its SEP-31 line commented out so cross-border is deliberately off. mykobo.co declares four services on a host that no longer resolves at all. Those are two completely different first meetings, and a website tells you neither.
The batch tab runs the same checks across a whole market in one pass and exports it as CSV: the qualified pipeline from §05, sorted by how far along each company already is. A method tab lists exactly what is requested and what these checks cannot prove.
Built by me for this application on public Stellar infrastructure. It is not SDF software and it is not affiliated with SDF.
Everything here comes from public sources as of August 2026: SDF's own blog and quarterly network update, company and regulator announcements, and the public job posting (2026). Network metrics are SDF's published Q1 2026 figures, quoted with the same scope SDF gave them: 22.5 billion operations is cumulative since 2014, the $2B in real-world assets was reported shortly after quarter end, and 4,400+ is developers engaged rather than a monthly-active count. Every claim on this page was independently re-checked against primary sources before publishing, and anything that could only be stated loosely has been left loose on purpose. Regulatory positions move quickly in this region, so each is dated. Named institutions appear because they are publicly associated with Stellar or with a public regulatory pilot; specific target accounts and deal approaches stay in my application materials rather than on a public page. This is unsolicited interview homework, and I am happy to walk through any section.
SDF regional market development team: stellar.org, Bringing Stellar to the Regions That Matter
Network metrics: stellar.org, Q1 2026: Execution at network scale
Kenanga tokenised money market funds on Stellar (Feb 2026): kenanga.com.my
BNM Digital Asset Innovation Hub pilots: The Edge Malaysia
Marketnode (SGX and Temasek): marketnode.com
HKMA stablecoin issuer regime: hkma.gov.hk
Stellar SEP standards: developers.stellar.org
Role: Business Development, APAC (public job posting, 2026)
Independent BD plan for the Stellar Development Foundation Business Development, APAC role · 2026 · edwardtay.com