PhotonPay: Stablecoins at the Heart of Global Trade

In Paper Routes, I wrote about how new payment rails spread through existing commercial relationships. A business with buyers and suppliers in many markets has more opportunities to encounter a new way of paying, use it, and introduce it to someone else.

That thinking helped shape our interest in PhotonPay, which helps businesses receive, convert, and send fiat and stablecoins across borders, and pay business expenses with virtual cards. Founded in Hong Kong, with roots in the Pearl River Delta, the company combines access to a dense trading network with a comprehensive payments product.

The Greater Bay Area connects nine mainland cities in the Pearl River Delta, including the manufacturing centers of Shenzhen, Guangzhou, and Dongguan, with Hong Kong and Macao. Those cities handled RMB 9.15 trillion of trade in 2025, roughly $1.3 trillion and a fifth of mainland China’s total. Shenzhen’s port alone connects to more than 300 ports across over 100 countries and regions. If you’ve bought clothes, electronics, or household goods online, your purchase may well have started its journey from the Pearl River Delta.

Hong Kong adds the banking, trading, and logistics services that help businesses manage those international connections. PhotonPay already serves exporters and trading companies in this network.

We believe stablecoins will take a growing share of cross-border business payments. They can settle around the clock, reduce reliance on intermediary banks, and lower settlement costs.

PhotonPay’s existing customer relationships give it a way to introduce those benefits to businesses already making international payments. As those customers adopt stablecoins, PhotonPay has an opportunity to handle more of their payments and to reach new customers among their overseas buyers and suppliers.

Consider an exporter receiving a bank transfer from one buyer and stablecoins from another, while its suppliers still require money in their bank accounts. PhotonPay lets it receive both forms of payment, convert funds, and pay suppliers through the same platform.

Handling that workflow through separate providers means moving money between platforms and reconciling separate records. A finance team using PhotonPay could bring those steps together and adopt stablecoins while continuing to serve buyers and suppliers that use bank transfers.

An advertising agency has a different workflow: clients fund campaigns using fiat or stablecoins, and the agency converts those funds and tops up PhotonPay-issued virtual cards to pay advertising platforms. Reliable top-ups keep campaigns running, while transaction records help the agency account for client spending.

PhotonPay’s coverage spans more than 200 countries and regions, supported by licenses, regulated partners, and connections to banks and local payment systems, with available services varying by market. That infrastructure makes it possible to turn stablecoin settlement into money a supplier can receive in a bank account. It also lets PhotonPay serve more of a customer’s business as it expands into new markets.

Lewison Chen founded PhotonPay in Hong Kong in 2015 after working as an engineer at Baidu, and the company began developing stablecoin capabilities in 2022. He’s spent a decade building the payments business and serving these customers. We’re drawn to his decision to bring stablecoins into infrastructure those businesses already use.

His executive team brings experience in compliance and financial partnerships from Ant International and major banks, alongside leaders who helped expand XTransfer internationally.

Our investment follows Paper Routes: as stablecoin adoption spreads through trading relationships, winning customers at a major trade hub creates opportunities far beyond it. We believe PhotonPay’s combined fiat and stablecoin product, backed by global coverage, positions Lewison and the team to win those relationships in the Greater Bay Area. An exporter there may be a local customer, but its next payment could take PhotonPay halfway around the world.