Company File • Fintech / Blockchain
TBCASoft
The Silicon Valley company quietly teaching competing payment apps and telecom carriers to cooperate - so your home wallet works across borders.
The Silicon Valley company quietly teaching competing payment apps and telecom carriers to cooperate - so your home wallet works across borders.
A traveler from Taipei walks into a Tokyo convenience store, opens the same payment app she uses at home, and scans the same QR code on the counter that a local would. The clerk does nothing different. The cash register does nothing different. Behind that ordinary green checkmark, a cross-carrier blockchain reconciles two countries, two currencies, and two payment networks that were never built to talk to each other. That blockchain is TBCASoft.
TBCASoft does not run a coin. It does not have a consumer app with its name on it. It is, by design, the part of the transaction nobody sees - the rails underneath the wallet you already trust. Roughly one in ten Taiwanese travelers to Japan now pays this way without ever learning the company's name. Which is exactly how the company wants it.
The best payment infrastructure is the kind you never notice. TBCASoft is betting its whole existence on being invisible.
// THE TBCASOFT PARADOXFour numbers, one quiet ambition: be the plumbing for a few billion phones and never get a logo on the receipt.
Send value from one country to another and the same three taxes appear every time: a fat foreign-exchange spread, a stack of processing fees, and a settlement delay measured in days. Worse, all of it tends to pool inside a single processor - one giant honeypot of transaction data that is one breach away from a very bad week.
Ling Wu had a front-row seat to all of it. Before founding TBCASoft, he helped clients build online payment systems, and kept hitting the same wall: cross-border payments were expensive because of the conversions and fees, and risky because the data sat in one place. The market had quietly accepted this as the weather. Wu did not.
Everyone treated cross-border friction as gravity - a fixed cost of living on a round planet. It turns out gravity was just a missing protocol.
// THE FOUNDING IRRITATIONThere was a second problem hiding behind the first. The institutions best positioned to fix cross-border payments - the world's telecom carriers - were structurally incapable of cooperating. Carriers compete for the same subscribers. Asking them to share a payment network is like asking rival newspapers to share a printing press. Possible in theory, awkward in practice, and nobody wants to own the press.
Wu's wager was that blockchain was not interesting as a currency - it was interesting as a referee. A consortium-based distributed ledger could let competing carriers, banks and payment apps operate a shared network where no single party holds the data and no single party sets the rules. In 2016 he founded TBCASoft in Sunnyvale to build exactly that. In 2017, he convinced SoftBank to co-found the Carrier Blockchain Study Group - the CBSG Consortium - the first telecom-carrier blockchain consortium of its kind.
You don't get rivals to cooperate by asking them to trust each other. You get them to cooperate by building something none of them has to trust - only verify.
// THE CONSORTIUM PRINCIPLEIt worked well enough that the names started arriving. SoftBank. IBM, which in 2019 announced a joint plan with TBCASoft to bring cross-carrier blockchain to the telecom industry. Carriers across Asia and the Middle East. By the time the consortium matured, its members collectively served more than 1.3 billion mobile subscribers - a reach most fintech startups can only put on a slide.
Founder and CEO Ling Wu also co-chairs the CBSG Consortium - which is a polite way of saying he is the person who keeps the rivals in the same room.
Ling Wu founds TBCASoft in Sunnyvale, California, to build a consortium blockchain for payments.
TBCASoft and SoftBank co-found the CBSG Consortium - the first telecom-carrier blockchain group.
Closes Series A funding led by SoftBank to build out the cross-carrier platform.
Announces a joint plan with IBM and SoftBank; launches the CCIS identity & authentication working group.
Raises a $25M Series B from Naver Financial and SoftBank to push toward commercial scale.
HIVEX goes live in Japan, integrating with PayPay and onboarding Taiwan's PXPay Plus users.
Launches Consumer-Present Mode in Japan; enters South Korea with Zero Pay and ICB.
HIVEX goes live in South Korea; signs a stablecoin MOU with StraitsX for instant FX settlement.
The cleverest thing about TBCASoft's flagship product is what it does not require. HIVEX lets a payment app in one country accept users from another - and every member keeps its own QR-code format, and no merchant has to touch its point-of-sale system. The interoperability happens on the ledger, not on the counter. Nobody has to rip anything out. That is the whole sales pitch, and it is a surprisingly hard one to copy.
A cross-border payment network for mobile wallets. Travelers pay abroad with their home QR app; merchants change nothing. Supports both merchant-present and consumer-present QR modes.
The carrier-run blockchain consortium, co-founded with SoftBank, whose members reach 1.3B+ subscribers. The body that lets rivals share a ledger without sharing control.
A cross-carrier identity system using zero-knowledge proofs, so you can prove who you are without revealing the underlying data - and stop drowning in passwords.
Most interoperability projects ask everyone to adopt one standard. TBCASoft asks everyone to keep theirs - and meet in the middle on the ledger. Diplomacy, shipped as software.
// WHY HIVEX SPREADSCCIS is the part where you finally stop inventing a new password for every account - assuming, of course, you can remember the one you already have.
Infrastructure pitches live or die on whether anyone actually plugs in. TBCASoft's answer is a live payment corridor across three of Asia's busiest travel markets. In Taiwan, HIVEX connects JKOPAY, PXPay Plus and E.SUN Bank - more than 12 million users. In Japan, integration with PayPay opened over four million payment locations. In South Korea, a January 2025 launch with the national ZeroPay standard opened more than a million merchants.
Bars compare reach across markets, not exact like-for-like units (users vs. POS vs. merchants vs. subscribers). Figures are approximate, drawn from company and press disclosures.
And the network is throwing off real volume: HIVEX processes around 500,000 cross-border transactions a month. The investors noticed. SoftBank backed the company early and again; in 2021 Korea's Naver joined SoftBank to put $25 million into the Series B - a round that, by the company's own account, helped it through the pandemic.
A guest list that reads like a who's-who of carriers, banks and payment apps - the kind of names that do not normally end up on the same ledger.
TBCASoft states its mission plainly: use blockchain to build a decentralized global value exchange network. Payments are just the first thing you can move across it. The same consortium rails that carry a QR transaction can carry an identity claim - which is why CCIS exists - and, increasingly, a stablecoin. In 2025 the company signed an MOU with Singapore's StraitsX to bring regulated stablecoins into HIVEX for instant foreign exchange and final settlement, trimming cost out of every cross-border hop.
Build the rails once. Run payments today, identity tomorrow, settlement in seconds. The product is plumbing; the ambition is a standard.
// THE DECENTRALIZED VALUE NETWORKIt is a deliberately unglamorous mission in an industry addicted to glamour. There is no token to speculate on, no exchange listing, no promise of overnight riches - the company says so explicitly. What there is instead is a small, globally distributed team of payments and cryptography veterans - alumni of IBM, PayPal, Goldman Sachs and Alibaba among them - quietly wiring together networks that were designed to stay apart.
Return to that convenience store. The traveler from Taipei still does nothing special: same app, same QR code, same clerk who notices nothing. But now multiply her by every traveler moving between Taiwan, Japan and Korea, and soon the markets beyond. Each one is a small vote that money should cross borders as easily as a text message - and that the rails carrying it should belong to a consortium, not a single gatekeeper.
That is the future TBCASoft is underwriting: not a flashier wallet, but an invisible agreement between the ones you already use. If the company succeeds, you will never think about it. The checkmark will just be green, everywhere, and the blockchain in Sunnyvale will keep answering - quietly, the way it always has.
The measure of TBCASoft's success will not be how often you say its name. It will be how rarely you have to.
// THE LAST WORD