Deng Guobiao, founder and CEO of XTransfer: Stablecoins will transform the B2B cross-border trade payment ecosystem

Economic Observer

The rapid rise of stablecoins has attracted much attention from the financial industry regarding the extent of transformation they will bring to the field of B2B cross-border trade payments.

Compared with the low efficiency (an average of 3-5 working days) and high fees (up to 5% handling fee) of traditional trade fund settlement, stablecoins, relying on the distributed ledger technology architecture of blockchain, are expected to achieve second-level account arrival and extremely low fees, thus becoming a new choice for global enterprises to carry out B2B cross-border trade settlement.

Data from XBIT, a cryptocurrency trading platform, shows that from February 2024 to February 2025, the application scale of stablecoins in the global B2B cross-border trade transaction field has shown a rapid growth, with a year-on-year increase of up to 4 times. Data released by BVNK, a blockchain payment institution, shows that currently, their annual stablecoin payment processing volume is about 15 billion US dollars, half of which comes from B2B trade receipts and payments.

Deng Guobiao, founder and CEO of XTransfer, a B2B foreign trade financial platform, has felt the strong interest of overseas enterprises in stablecoin cross-border trade payments.

"Recently, our market research on overseas enterprise users found that more and more overseas enterprises are willing to try to use stablecoins for cross-border trade receipts and payments," he said in an exclusive interview with our reporter. This has prompted XTransfer to plan to launch a stablecoin cross-border trade collection service for overseas enterprise users within 2025.

"It is expected that the proportion of XTransfer's stablecoin collections will reach more than one-third of the total collections within three years, and it may be even faster," Deng Guobiao told reporters frankly.

Anti-money laundering risk control becomes core competitiveness

While the application scale of stablecoins is growing rapidly, the corresponding regulatory framework is also being strengthened simultaneously.

The stablecoin regulatory legislation implemented in the United States clearly requires the inclusion of stablecoins in the anti-money laundering system. The stablecoin regulatory bill implemented in Hong Kong, China also emphasizes that stablecoin transactions must comply with relevant anti-money laundering regulatory requirements.

In the view of industry insiders, as the application of stablecoins in the global B2B cross-border trade payment field continues to expand, anti-money laundering risk control capabilities will become a new opportunity for cross-border payment platforms and financial institutions to seize stablecoin cross-border trade payments in the future, and also a core competitive barrier for them to continue to expand their business scale.

However, the anonymous nature of stablecoins (enterprises and individuals only need to apply for addresses and keys to conduct stablecoin transactions) and the separation of on-chain and off-chain information have put the anti-money laundering risk control of stablecoin B2B cross-border trade payments in a dilemma of "seeing the capital flow but not understanding the trade background". How to solve this dilemma has obviously become the core challenge of anti-money laundering compliance in stablecoin B2B cross-border payments.

Industry insiders said that the B2B cross-border trade chain is long, from inquiry, communication, customization, searching for raw material suppliers, processing and production enterprises, freight forwarders, shipment, customs clearance, etc., a transaction may take several months. The data of each link in the trade chain, as well as the identity information of global buyers and sellers that can be used to verify the authenticity of the trade, are generally scattered off-chain. How to effectively collect and analyze these off-chain data and efficiently and accurately match the on-chain capital flow is the key to implementing anti-money laundering risk control in stablecoin B2B cross-border payments.

"This requires efficient and comprehensive connection between on-chain and off-chain information," Deng Guobiao told reporters. Specifically, XTransfer will adopt a dual verification mechanism combining "on-chain behavior analysis and off-chain trade authenticity verification". Based on the multi-dimensional data and profound experience accumulated in serving B2B cross-border trade payments for many years, XTransfer conducts strict risk control reviews on cross-border trade enterprise customers off-chain, including cross-verification of enterprise identity information, trade information flow, logistics and other multi-dimensional data. When these enterprises use stablecoin payments, XTransfer can automatically accurately match their off-chain trade background with on-chain capital flows, thereby efficiently and accurately completing the anti-money laundering risk control work of stablecoin B2B cross-border trade payments.

Since its establishment, XTransfer has integrated payment and risk control, building a digital, automated, internet-based and intelligent anti-money laundering risk control system. Its AI-driven anti-money laundering risk control infrastructure adapts to the trends and characteristics of miniaturization, fragmentation and high frequency of B2B cross-border trade, and can achieve low risk control costs, high accuracy and good user experience.

"AI has been a great help in processing this complex and fragmented information," Deng Guobiao said frankly. For example, the remittance message of a B2B cross-border trade by an overseas enterprise is 5 letters + a series of numbers. In the past, XTransfer's risk control system did not know what this meant, and it was likely to list this transaction as "abnormal and suspicious" and strengthen the anti-money laundering risk control review. But through AI technology, it was identified that these 5 letters + a series of numbers belong to a certain tile model, and in addition, the remitter is engaged in tile trade, so that XTransfer has sufficient basis to list this trade fund settlement in the category of normal tile trade.

AI can also significantly improve XTransfer's efficiency in verifying the authenticity of B2B cross-border trade backgrounds. For example, AI automatically crawls relevant information from the official website of trading enterprises and quickly judges the types of products the enterprises are engaged in, so that XTransfer can quickly check whether the trade background of relevant payment is consistent with the commodity category presented on the enterprise's official website.

The era of "dual-currency wallet" is coming

"In the field of B2B cross-border payments, all payment enterprises and banks will definitely support stablecoins in the future; otherwise, they will gradually decline or even be eliminated under the strong momentum of new infrastructure replacing old infrastructure," Deng Guobiao believes. In the future, blockchain-based stablecoins will become a new infrastructure for cross-border trade settlement. On the premise of doing a good job in anti-money laundering risk control of stablecoin B2B cross-border trade payments, all B2B cross-border wallet forms will usher in new change trends.

"In the near future, dual-currency wallets will become a new standard in the field of B2B cross-border trade payments, that is, more and more service institutions will provide fiat currency + stablecoin dual-currency wallets to B2B cross-border trade enterprises. Enterprises will choose fiat currency or stablecoins for cross-border payments according to their own trade characteristics, capital arrival time and fee cost requirements," Deng Guobiao said. In the process of gaining dual recognition from the market and supervision, although stablecoins will develop rapidly in the next few years, they still cannot replace fiat currencies. The demand for exchange between stablecoins and fiat currencies will exist for a long time, which is also an important reason why dual-currency wallets will become a trend.

In view of the fact that some trading enterprises lack understanding of stablecoins and have concerns about the security and compliance of stablecoin B2B cross-border payments, XTransfer will continuously guide enterprise users to understand the stablecoin B2B cross-border payment process through its global sales team, reducing the threshold for users to use stablecoins for B2B cross-border trade payments.

"Stablecoins are reconstructing the B2B cross-border trade payment ecosystem," Deng Guobiao pointed out. This is not only a technological upgrade, but also an innovation in business models.

He emphasized that the core competitiveness of B2B cross-border payment institutions is not "moving money", but anti-money laundering risk control. Through the combination of blockchain and AI risk control, XTransfer will provide efficient and compliant new cross-border payment infrastructure for global small, medium and micro trading enterprises.

"In the next three years, this will definitely become a new industry paradigm, and we are ready," Deng Guobiao told reporters.

(Author: Chen Zhi)

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