Iced coffee and invisible dollars: inside Vietnam’s stablecoin economy

The coffee meeting looks like any other in Ho Chi Minh City’s District 1. Two plainly dressed young men sit down for iced coffees, the hum of motorbikes filtering through a glass door. A quarter of a million dollars is about to cross a border in minutes – with no bank, no wire transfer, and no SWIFT code.

The mechanism is a stablecoin. The currency is the US dollar, and the technology is blockchain. And the country in which it is happening prohibits crypto as a means of payment. The cafe transaction took place on an ordinary weekday morning in March, and the participants asked not to be identified.

This is Vietnam in 2026: a financial paradox. QR codes pepper restaurant tables and market stalls. A youthful, urbanising middle class has gone cashless. The Communist government boasts of digital transformation. Yet beneath this polished exterior runs a thriving shadow financial system that resists control.

Leo Pham, 35, doesn’t demand your attention. He arrives 20 minutes late and apologises on arrival. We met at Cà phê Linh, a cosy café known for its salt coffee, its vintage décor dotted with old Brother sewing machines. A mosquito has already found me. Pham’s voice stays low even though the café bustles.

Pham has watched this parallel economy grow from the inside. The founder of SqrDAO, one of Vietnam’s most active Web3 communities, has spent years navigating the gap between what is officially permitted and what is practically happening.

U.S. dollar-backed stablecoins have emerged as the digital currency of choice, providing a reliable store of value and a rapid, low-cost bridge between the global economy and Vietnam’s closely controlled financial system.

“Stablecoins are doing what Bitcoin was originally meant to do,” says Pham. “Fast, programmable, borderless money.”

According to Chainalysis data, Vietnam ranked fourth globally in crypto adoption in 2025, with an annual trading volume exceeding $200 billion¹. Crypto is now part of everyday economic life in the Southeast Asian nation of just over 100 million people. Yet it has only recently moved towards formal legal recognition, and remains prohibited as a payment method.

Digital gold for a new generation

To understand crypto’s grip on Vietnam, you have to understand what came before it. Over generations, the Vietnamese – colonised by France, bloodied by war, and ruled by the Communist Party for the past half century – have learned to survive outside official systems. Hedging against risk by holding gold or U.S. dollars outside the banking system has been financial common sense.

Foreign exchange is tightly managed by the state through strict capital controls. While the dong has stabilised in recent years, past periods of inflation and devaluation have reinforced a preference for assets seen as more resilient.

Associate Professor Huy Pham of RMIT University Vietnam explains that USD-backed stablecoins fit neatly into this tradition. “They can be seen as a digital extension of this preference for external value anchors.”

For Vietnam’s younger, digitally literate generation, they are valuable as assets held outside the system – portable, borderless, and not subject to the decisions of the State Bank of Vietnam.

The real breakthrough came in 2021–2022, when crypto enthusiasm reached a fever pitch globally. In Vietnam, trading volumes surged as a generation of freelancers, developers, and remote workers discovered that stablecoins offered something their bank accounts could not: access to dollars, fast transfers, and freedom from the queues and paperwork of formal remittance services.

The QR mirage: two economies, one country

Walk into a café in Ho Chi Minh City, and the official digital economy looks seamless. VietQR codes accept payments from a dozen banking apps. Popular apps like Grab, Shopee, and MoMo have turned smartphones into wallets. The government’s “cashless society” narrative has real substance – digital payment volumes have grown dramatically, and financial inclusion has widened since 2020.

But the QR code economy has a ceiling. It operates in dong, within borders, and under the government’s eye. For the growing class of Vietnamese who earn in dollars, the official rails are simply insufficient.

One freelance developer based in the coastal city of Da Nang, who asked not to be identified, explains that stablecoins have become his default payment rail. “Most of my clients pay in USDT now. It’s faster, no paperwork, and no questions. I convert what I need into dong and keep the rest in dollars. If I get paid through a bank, there are delays, fees, and sometimes questions.”

This is where the OTC market fills the gap. In Da Nang, Hanoi, and Ho Chi Minh City, stablecoin brokers operate in plain sight. These so-called “chain agents” convert USDT into dong, process large transfers between parties who have never met, and facilitate cross-border capital flows that the formal banking system doesn’t accommodate. They operate in cafés, via Telegram, and through established networks of trust. They move serious volumes.

“Stablecoins are the closest thing we have to digital money right now – that’s how most people use them,” Pham says. “The biggest use case in Vietnam is remittance. People get paid from abroad in stablecoins and convert locally.” The off-ramp, he explains, can be an OTC desk, a peer-to-peer transaction, or simply “some guy – a chain agent.”

The blockchain infrastructure powering much of this activity is TRON, which has become the dominant network for USDT transactions across Southeast Asia.

According to data provided to The Node by TRON, the network’s activity is heavily concentrated in Asia, accounting for nearly $341 billion in annualised transaction volume.

In 2025, TRON said it processed more than 320 million transactions in a single month overall, driven by repeat usage rather than one-off events. Vietnam, alongside India, Pakistan, and Indonesia, is identified by TRON as a core market where stablecoins on its network are used for remittances, savings, and peer-to-peer transactions.

The Party’s dilemma: tolerate, tax, or crack down?

The booming, open use of crypto in Vietnam has posed a growing dilemma for the country’s Communist rulers. The government banned cryptocurrency² as a payment method in 2018, but has long turned a mostly blind eye to the unofficial ecosystem.

This uneasy coexistence is now entering a new phase, however. With Vietnam’s crypto economy now too large to ignore, the state is moving to assert greater control over a system that has thrived precisely because of its absence.

The government is moving to launch its first licensed crypto exchanges while drafting rules that would prohibit citizens from trading on overseas platforms³.

Its primary concern is capital outflows. Vietnam’s strict foreign exchange regime exists to protect the dong and prevent the flight of foreign currency reserves. Stablecoins are, in the eyes of regulators, a direct threat to this system.

“Capital controls worked very well when there were specific bottlenecks in foreign exchange,” says Michael Bacina, a digital law specialist at Cayman Islands-based NXT Law.

“The rise of crypto as a form of digital cash means that traditional capital control systems will not operate in the way they used to, or as effectively, if at all.”

But the political calculus is more nuanced than simple prohibition. Money flowing into Vietnam via crypto is tolerated, and even quietly welcomed.

“If the money is going into Vietnam, from their point of view it’s still money being spent here – that’s fine,” Leo Pham explains. “But if there’s money going out, that’s a different story.”

Associate Professor Huy Pham frames the shift more broadly: “Regulation will determine what is legal, but crypto will increasingly shape what is practical.”

Enforcement happens – people have been arrested for OTC crypto trading. Yet the shadow economy goes on in not-so-shadowy ways every day, in cafes and on smartphones across the country.

A secondary driver of regulation is crime. Leo Pham is direct about this: “Cryptocurrency, until the last one or two years, has been pretty low on the priority list. Now it’s here because cybercriminals and criminals in general are leveraging cryptocurrency more and more to launder money, and a lot of them go to Vietnam.”

The intersection of Vietnam’s geography – bordering Myanmar’s lawless Shan State, within reach of Southeast Asia’s online scam compounds – with its crypto infrastructure has brought international law enforcement pressure to bear.

The last to move, now moving fast

Vietnam was the last of the top five Southeast Asian economies to introduce any meaningful crypto regulation, behind Singapore, Indonesia, the Philippines, and Thailand. It’s now catching up rapidly. The government has formally approved a landmark legal framework recognising digital and crypto assets. The Digital Technology Industry Law – passed in June 2025 and taking effect on Jan. 1, 2026 – establishes the regulatory foundation.

By March, five brokerage companies had passed an initial qualification round, according to a finance ministry document reviewed by Reuters⁴: affiliates of Techcombank, VPBank, LPBank, brokerage VIX Securities, and conglomerate Sun Group.

The regulatory blueprint⁵ is clearly modelled on regional precedents. Vietnam appears to be pursuing a South Korea-style model in which all transactions must be settled in local currency through licensed domestic exchanges. But stablecoins will remain in the grey zone for now – the law does not recognise fiat-backed coins, leaving them to be regulated separately.

According to a report⁶ by Bitcoin Magazine, global platforms like Binance and OKX could face restrictions, as the Vietnamese authorities aim to redirect trading volume to exchanges they can monitor, tax, and ultimately control.

The licensing process in Vietnam itself is slow and arduous. It can take an exchange around six months to simply pass round one, according to industry participants.

But the direction of travel is clear – the government is reasserting control.

Bacina frames the licensing drive in terms of consumer protection rather than a crackdown on crypto. The OTC market, visible and unregulated for now, presents a harder problem. “If the government really wished to crack down, this would be entirely viable, but it would push the markets underground,” he warns. “While they are visible… the government can see what is happening and understand it. Once it is underground, it is much harder to understand or regulate.”

Despite the growth of regulated exchanges, the OTC market is likely to remain active due to its speed, lower transaction costs, and flexibility. Most informal or peer-to-peer OTC markets give users more privacy than centralised exchanges such as Binance or Coinbase, which require full KYC/AML checks. They are also widely used by large traders, or “whales,” who seek to avoid slippage when executing large orders that could move market prices.

In Vietnam and other parts of Southeast Asia, OTC trading often relies on long-standing informal brokers with established reputations and personal networks. Trust in these relationships can outweigh the appeal of newer formal platforms, especially in markets where regulatory frameworks are only just evolving.

Operating in the grey zone

For now, the crypto ecosystem remains populated by people who learned crypto long before regulators took any interest in it.

Ryan Pham – whose family name is among the most common in Vietnam – greets me enthusiastically over an iced coffee. The 34-year-old describes himself as an entrepreneur working with blockchain systems — a familiar archetype in Southeast Asia’s fast-moving crypto underground. His fluency in crypto-native systems reflects a generation that learned finance through protocols rather than institutions.

“I’ve been using crypto since 2017,” Ryan says. “Back then, stablecoins weren’t popular – they were more like platform tokens used within projects.”

He describes using stablecoins for both personal and professional flows, including funding from overseas projects. One transfer he showed me was worth roughly $80,000 tied to a foundation supporting his work. In another instance, he moved around $100,000 in USDT via the OKX platform.

His entry point into crypto’s utility was more mundane – he used it to pay his international school fees back in 2018. “Using a bank would have cost around $140 in fees,” he says. “With crypto, it was about $2, and the transfer arrived within 20 minutes instead of three days.”

Da Nang: the Web3 frontier city

As the government moves to take a slice of the crypto economy, it’s also trying to avoid suppressing the free-wheeling entrepreneurial spirit that drives it.

Da Nang, a beach city of around 1.3 million people, is central to achieving that balance. If Ho Chi Minh City is the engine of Vietnam’s crypto economy, Da Nang is its experimental frontier. As well as its beaches, the city is known for its French colonial architecture and the marble mountains that rise from the coastal plain. But it has also emerged as a hub for digital nomads, blockchain builders, and international talent increasingly circulating through Southeast Asia’s tech ecosystem.

“Da Nang has this Bali-like vibe, but more urban,” says Leo Pham, whose organisation has made the city its primary physical base. “You’ve got the ocean, mountains, old town — it attracts a certain kind of global, mobile talent. A lot of digital nomads – especially from Europe – come for the lifestyle. It’s affordable, connected, and has that international energy.”

The city’s appeal for Web3 goes beyond aesthetics. While Hanoi remains the seat of regulatory power and real political lobbying, Da Nang operates with what Pham describes as a more permissive attitude.

“The government there is quite open to new ideas… when it comes to Web3, when it comes to hosting events that focus on frontier technology – blockchain, AI, semiconductor – they leave it to the private sector,” he says.

Da Nang has become Vietnam’s crypto sandbox, where the government can allow experimentation while maintaining oversight. In 2025, for example, it greenlit the Basal Pay digital app, the country’s first official crypto payments wallet, aimed at allowing foreign visitors to exchange crypto, including stablecoins, for dong.

SqrDAO has secured a government agency⁸ as a formal partner, providing the legal cover to host events with foreign speakers – a process that, elsewhere in Vietnam, requires navigating significantly more bureaucratic red tape.

A test of Vietnam’s pragmatism

The stablecoin economy is not operating in a vacuum. It is supported by a growing layer of financial infrastructure — crypto-linked debit cards, peer-to-peer platforms, OTC desks, and fintech integrations — that is making access to the digital dollar increasingly frictionless for ordinary Vietnamese. Crypto cards are emerging as a particularly pragmatic tool for small teams and freelancers.

“Crypto cards are becoming popular because they’re simple – you load stablecoins and spend without going through layers of KYC,” says Leo Pham. “For small teams or freelancers, it’s enough. You don’t need a full banking setup – just a few thousand dollars and a card.”

The Asia-Pacific (APAC) region as a whole is driving this trend. According to Chainalysis total crypto transaction volume in APAC grew 69% to $2.36 trillion in the year through June 2025, led by India, Vietnam, and Pakistan⁹. TRON data shows that retail transfers under $1,000 account for 60–74% of activity during Asian daytime hours – a pattern consistent with P2P payments and remittances rather than institutional speculation. The institutional flows, between $1,000 and $10,000, concentrate during European, Middle Eastern, and Asian business hours, indicating OTC and treasury activity outside the US market.

Vietnam is moving from a chaotic, offshore-driven crypto market towards a controlled, domestically regulated system. Having watched its neighbours build regulatory frameworks, its government appears to have concluded that the alternative – ceding the entire market to foreign platforms and unregulated OTC networks – is more dangerous than the risks of permitting a licensed domestic industry.

Pragmatism in the economic sphere has long been a hallmark of the country’s Communist rulers. Cities like Da Nang are shaping the transition on the ground, serving as laboratories for the coexistence of Web3 culture and state oversight.

The fundamental tension is not going away. Vietnam’s Communist Party leadership wants to protect the dong, control capital flows, and prevent the financial infrastructure from being weaponised by criminals. At the same time, its young, entrepreneurial, globally connected population has already voted with its (digital) wallets.

Professor Huy Pham sees the outcome as neither confrontation nor capitulation.

“The likely outcome is not a simple contest between state and market, but a process of constrained adaptation,” he says.

Tanzeel Akhtar

¹Chainalysis. 2025. “2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index.” Chainalysis.

²CoinDesk. 2017. “Vietnam’s Central Bank Announces Ban on Bitcoin Payments.” CoinDesk, October 31, 2017.

³Reuters. 2026. “Vietnam Firms Vie for Crypto Licences as Hanoi Plans Ban on Overseas Trading.” Reuters, March 17, 2026.

⁴Ibid

⁵PwC Vietnam. 2025. “Vietnam Cryptocurrencies.” PwC Vietnam.

⁶Bitcoin Magazine. 2026. “Vietnam to Restrict Overseas Crypto.” Bitcoin Magazine.

⁷Fintech News Singapore. 2026. “Da Nang Crypto Sandbox.” Fintech News Singapore.

⁸SqrDAO. 2026. “Da Nang’s Dual Engine: Linking the Local and Global.” SqrDAO Blog.

⁹Chainalysis. 2025. “2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index.” Chainalysis.