dtcpay Took Bitcoin Off the Counter and kept the receipt
In January 2025, a Singapore payments company did the thing almost nobody in crypto does: it removed products. Out went Bitcoin and Ether at checkout. What stayed was the dull, dollar-pegged part - and a licence stack spanning six jurisdictions that turns out to be the actual business.
There is a moment in every crypto payments demo where the room goes quiet. The founder taps a phone against a terminal, a QR code resolves, a confirmation chimes, and everyone claps. Then someone in the back - usually the person who has actually run a shop - asks the question that ends the meeting. So what do I have in my bank account tomorrow morning?
For most of the last decade, the honest answer was: something. An amount. Possibly a different amount by the time your accountant looks at it. That single unresolved sentence is why crypto checkout buttons proliferated for years without ever becoming ordinary, and it is the sentence dtcpay has spent since 2019 trying to make boring.
The Singapore company, legally still Digital Treasures Center Pte Ltd, does something that sounds simple and is not. A customer pays in a stablecoin. A swap engine converts it at a live rate at the instant of the transaction. The merchant is settled in ordinary currency. The shop never holds a digital asset, never opens a wallet, never explains anything unusual to an auditor. The blockchain is present in the way plumbing is present in a restaurant: load-bearing, and nobody's problem but the operator's.
The subtraction
In January 2025, dtcpay announced it would support stablecoins only. Bitcoin, Ether and the rest came off the checkout page. The company's stated reasoning was almost anticlimactic: after roughly a year of transaction data, a significant share of what customers were actually spending was already stablecoins. People do not, it turns out, buy handbags with an asset they believe will be worth more in six months.
Removing a headline product is rare in this industry, where the pressure runs entirely the other way - list more tokens, add more chains, announce more integrations. dtcpay narrowed. What it got in return was a product it could describe to a regulator in one sentence, and to a department store buyer in two.
How a dtcpay payment moves
Figure 1 - The whole company is the second box. Everything else is a payments product other people already sell; the swap is what lets a shop say yes without changing anything about how it does its books.
Six regulators, one product
Ask what dtcpay's moat is and the answer is filed in cabinets. It holds a Major Payment Institution licence from the Monetary Authority of Singapore covering account issuance, domestic and cross-border transfers, merchant acquisition, e-money issuance and digital payment tokens. It has licences or registrations in Hong Kong, Australia, the United States and Canada. In 2025 it added a Luxembourg Electronic Money Institution licence, which functions as a passport into the European Economic Area. It also picked up ISO/IEC 27001 certification and, in Australia, AUSTRAC registration.
None of this is exciting. All of it is slow. A competent engineering team can clone a checkout flow in a fortnight; it cannot clone three years of supervisory correspondence in six jurisdictions. In a category where the failure mode is usually regulatory rather than technical, the paperwork is the product.
Where dtcpay is licensed to operate
Figure 2 - A map that took longer to draw than the software. Each tile represents a separate supervisory relationship, and each one is a door a rival has to knock on independently.
“By prioritising compliance and regulatory rigour alongside a user-centric experience, we have built a foundational infrastructure ready for global scale.”Alice Liu, Co-Founder & CEO, dtcpay
Who is actually paying this way
The interesting thing about dtcpay's customer list is how unfashionable it is. Not a decentralised autonomous organisation in sight.
In October 2024 the company switched on digital payment token acceptance with Capella Hotel Group: a QR code at the front desk of Capella Singapore, and payment links for Patina Maldives on Fari Islands. Which means, if you want the sentence in its full strangeness, you can settle an overwater villa bill in USDT. In February 2025, Metro Department Store became the first department store in Singapore to accept stablecoins, online and in aisle. Elsewhere on the list: a bespoke tailor called MARLO, and the luxury furniture brand Christopher Guy.
This is not the crypto-native crowd. It is high-value, cross-border, frequently inconvenienced commerce - the customer who is in Singapore for four days, holds dollars somewhere that is not a Singaporean bank, and would prefer not to discover their card's foreign transaction limit at the till. dtcpay's second constituency is corporate: businesses moving money across borders who have priced the five-day wire and found it expensive in ways that never appear on a fee schedule. Its third is institutional, buying dtcpay's own regulated rails as stablecoin-as-a-service.
The speed argument, in numbers
In June 2025 dtcpay connected to Mastercard Move, opening more than 49 payout corridors out of Singapore - China, the UAE, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Switzerland, Thailand, Vietnam, parts of the EU. The published performance is the clearest number the company has put on the table: 60% of payments received within one hour, 95% within 24 hours. A traditional international wire, by comparison, can take up to five days.
The temptation is to file that under convenience. It is not. For a business, five days of money in transit is five days of working capital that cannot pay a supplier, restock a shelf or make payroll. Speed in payments is not a feature. It is balance sheet.
Time to receive a cross-border payment
Figure 3 - Two of these bars are percentages of payments; the third is a duration. They are on the same chart because that mismatch is the whole point: one system reports in hours, the other still reports in days.
What you can actually buy
dtcpay sells across three counters - personal, business, institutional - and the products slot into a single chain from acceptance through to card spend.
| Product | What it does |
|---|---|
| POS+ terminalIn-store | Regulated digital payment token acceptance at a physical counter. dtcpay says it was the first of its kind in Singapore. |
| Online checkout & PayByLinkRemote | Hosted checkout and shareable payment links - the mechanism behind those Maldives resort bills. |
| Real-time swap engineCore | Converts between stablecoins and fiat at live spot rates. The layer everything else depends on. |
| Digital Treasures CardLaunched 2025 | A Visa Infinite card funded from converted stablecoin balances, spendable at over 150 million Visa merchant locations. The terminal has no idea. |
| Multi-currency walletPersonal & business | Holds fiat and supported stablecoins with deposit, send, swap and scan-to-pay. |
| Business accounts & corporate cardsB2B | Corporate spend controls, approval workflows and reconciliation tooling. |
| Stablecoin-as-a-Service & APIsInstitutional | Wallet services, card issuing, virtual accounts and APIs sold to banks and financial institutions. |
| dtcpay eSIMThe odd one | Prepaid global data plans, sold inside a payments app. |
That last row is worth sitting with. A regulated payments company selling eSIM data plans looks like a mistake until you invert it: once you are licensed to hold a customer's money in an app, the marginal cost of selling them one more prepaid digital thing is close to zero. Every wallet drifts toward becoming a store. dtcpay has simply started early.
How the money is made
dtcpay does not publish a rate card, which is worth stating plainly rather than guessing around. What is visible is where the revenue lines sit: merchant acceptance fees on processed transactions, the spread earned when stablecoins are swapped into fiat, cross-border payout pricing, card interchange and programme fees on the Visa Infinite and corporate cards, and licensing its own regulated infrastructure to institutions. The marketing language is “no hidden fees” and competitive real-time rates rather than published numbers.
Nor has dtcpay ever disclosed transaction volume, merchant count or user numbers. Third-party estimates put annual revenue around the low eight figures in US dollars. Anyone claiming a firmer figure is inventing it.
The neighbourhood
The closest comparison is Triple-A, another MAS-licensed Singapore processor doing end-to-end stablecoin acceptance and settlement. Beyond that sit BVNK, Alchemy Pay, Tylt, and BitPay, which has been at this since 2011. Widen the frame and dtcpay is benchmarked against ordinary merchant acquirers - Stripe, Airwallex, PayU, Xendit, Flutterwave - most of whom will eventually add a stablecoin rail and are not in a rush.
dtcpay's argument for itself is the shape of the suite. A plugin solves acceptance and stops. dtcpay owns acceptance, conversion, settlement, wallets and card issuing, which means the money does not change hands between vendors at any point. In payments, handoffs are where value leaks and blame gets distributed.
“We see a massive opportunity in the ‘real-world use’ of stablecoin where utility meets regulated finance.”Genping Liu, General Partner, Vertex Ventures SEA & India
The people, and one small tell about them
dtcpay was founded in 2019 by Alice Liu, who is CEO, and Band Zhao, who is Chairman; Sam Lin is COO. Both founders are alumni of NUS Business School, and the original idea was less romantic than the current pitch - put credit cards, Alipay, WeChat Pay and digital currencies behind one platform, so a merchant only has to integrate once.
The detail that says most about the culture is not on the careers page. The founders endowed the “dtcpay Award” at NUS Business School, their own alma mater, spanning undergraduate, MBA and Master of Finance students. Winners receive a cash prize and an internship at the company. Separately, Alice Liu was named FinTech Mentor of the Year at the SFF FinTech Excellence Awards 2025 - a category that rewards developing other people rather than shipping anything. The company's YouTube channel, meanwhile, cheerfully documents a Hawaii team retreat and a sixth-anniversary party, which is not standard behaviour for a regulated payments firm.
What the new money buys
On 17 March 2026, dtcpay closed a US$10M Series A led by Vertex Ventures Southeast Asia & India, with Favour Capital advising. That follows a US$16.5M pre-Series A in June 2023 whose lead investor was, notably, not a crypto fund at all: Kwee Liong Tek, chairman of Singapore luxury property developer Pontiac Land Group, alongside a former Carlyle managing director and a former KPMG Asia-Pacific chairman. Total disclosed funding is around US$26.5M - modest by the standards of the category, and consistent with a company that has been building licences rather than burning growth budget.
Disclosed funding, cumulative
Figure 4 - Two rounds, three years apart, and a property developer leading the first one. The investor list reads more like a Singapore board directory than a crypto cap table.
The stated use of funds is unglamorous in the same register as everything else: sharpen the swap engine, strengthen infrastructure, and staff up the jurisdictions the company has already spent years getting licensed in. In July 2026 it added a partnership with TP for round-the-clock English and Mandarin support across Asia Pacific - the kind of announcement that only matters if you have enough customers to answer at three in the morning.
The road so far
The part that will still be true in ten years
Stablecoin payments will either become invisible or they will not happen. That is the entire wager. No shopper wants to learn a chain. No merchant wants a second set of books. The winning version of this technology is the version where the customer taps a card, the shop sees its own currency, and neither party has a story to tell about it afterwards.
dtcpay has organised itself around that unremarkable outcome - to the point of removing its most recognisable products to get there faster. Whether it wins is an open question; it is a small company in a category where Stripe could show up on any given Tuesday. But its bet is legible, which is more than most of this industry can say. Make the interesting part someone else's problem, and sell the boring part to everyone.
“Our mission is to deliver a platform where faster, safer, and more cost-efficient transactions are the standard, not the exception.”Alice Liu, Co-Founder & CEO, dtcpay