Ling Wu

Pull out a phone in Taipei, scan a QR code in a Tokyo convenience store, and have the payment clear in seconds across two currencies, two regulators and two telecom networks. That choreography is the thing Ling Wu has spent the better part of a decade building, and it is the thing his company HIVEX now runs across a network that touches more than 1.5 billion mobile payment users.

Wu is the founder and CEO of TBCASoft, the Silicon Valley company behind HIVEX, a blockchain-based cross-border payment network. The pitch is deceptively plain: the carrier you already pay every month for data can also be the rail that moves your money anywhere. No new app to download, no bank account required, just the SIM card that billions of people already carry.

He arrived at this from an unusual direction. Wu is a physicist by first training and a computational mathematician by second - a B.S. in Physics from National Taiwan University, then an M.S. in Scientific Computing and Computational Mathematics from Stanford. People who have heard him speak describe a mathematician's habit of reframing the question before answering it.

That sentence sounds like a slogan until you sit with the arithmetic behind it. The finance world sorts people into banked and unbanked. Wu sorts them differently - mobilized and non-mobilized. By 2020 the planet held close to 6 billion mobile subscribers, nearly twice the banked population. If the phone is the most widely held financial instrument on earth, he reasons, then telecommunications and finance - two of the most heavily regulated industries that exist - were always going to collide. He just decided to stand at the intersection and build the traffic system.

Before the blockchain, the database

Wu's resume reads like a tour through the engines underneath enterprise computing. In 1995 he joined Oracle as a Senior Member of Technical Staff. There he delivered Oracle Recovery Manager, known to a generation of database administrators simply as RMAN, led the project to transform Oracle 8i from 32-bit to 64-bit, and co-designed the work that pushed Oracle Database toward Five Nines - 99.99% availability. It is a specific kind of engineering pride: building the layer that is never supposed to fail, the part customers only notice when it breaks.

In 1999 he moved to BroadVision, the early e-commerce technology pioneer, as Vice President and General Manager of APJ and Greater China. That role pointed him at Asia's markets and at the messy, exhilarating problem of selling and scaling technology across very different countries and regulators - a skill that turns out to matter enormously when you are later trying to stitch together telecom carriers across a dozen jurisdictions.

The consortium gambit

Wu founded TBCASoft in 2016. A year later came the move that gave the idea critical mass: in September 2017, TBCASoft and SoftBank launched the Carrier Blockchain Study Group, the CBSG Consortium, with Wu as co-chairman. Rather than competing with carriers, he invited them in. The consortium has grown to 19 carrier members representing more than 1.3 billion subscribers - names like Axiata, PLDT, Telin, Turkcell, Viettel and Zain among them.

It is a patient, unglamorous strategy. Consortiums move at the speed of their slowest member's legal department. But for cross-border payments, where the whole value is in everyone agreeing to the same rails, the consortium is the product. In 2021 the bet drew capital: TBCASoft raised $25M, with Naver and SoftBank among the backers.

Stablecoins, and the 2025 turn

HIVEX has been quietly using stablecoin technology for cross-border clearing since 2023, before stablecoin payments became a headline. In 2025 Wu pushed further. TBCASoft signed an MOU - branded Project HIVEX StableLink - with StraitsX, the Singapore-licensed Major Payment Institution that issues the XSGD and XUSD stablecoins. The aim is to graduate the network from instant clearing to regulated instant settlement and foreign exchange, using compliant stablecoins to deliver finality and slash the cost of moving money between Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Thailand and the United States.

Described plainly, it is an attempt to do what SWIFT and correspondent banking do, but in seconds instead of days, and at a fraction of the cost. Wu positions HIVEX as the first compliant cross-border payment network to use multi-currency stablecoins for both clearing and settlement. The mobile users at the edges of that network - scanning QR codes, tapping NFC - mostly never see the machinery. Which, for an engineer who once chased Five Nines, is rather the point.

The texture of the thing

What makes Wu interesting is less the technology than the angle of attack. He keeps choosing the boring, regulated, hard-to-coordinate path - databases that must not fail, carriers that must agree, regulators that must approve - and treats coordination itself as the innovation. He talks about 5G not as a buzzword but as the missing precondition for mobile blockchain at scale. He frames financial inclusion not as charity but as arithmetic: the phone got there first.

It is a long game, played mostly out of the headlines, across conference stages in Shanghai, Barcelona, Bali and Las Vegas, in consortium meetings and partnership MOUs. Ten years in, the scoreboard reads 1.5 billion connected users and a stablecoin settlement layer taking shape. Wu, for his part, still talks like the mathematician he trained to be - more interested in the elegance of the system than in being seen running it.