Capital, Compliance, And Corridors: Native's Tommy Li Reveals What Makes 24/7 Stablecoin Settlement Possible | Metaverse Post

In Brief

Native’s Tommy Li explains what 24/7 stablecoin settlement really requires, why banks and exchanges can’t do it, and why Asia is testing it first.

When Mastercard announced it would add stablecoin settlement to its network this June, the pitch was simple: cards that settle intraday, on weekends, on holidays — the kind of round-the-clock movement traditional bank rails were never built to do. What the announcement didn’t explain is who actually makes that possible. Every one of those settlements needs someone holding inventory and quoting both sides of the trade at three in the morning, in any currency, while the banks are closed.

That’s the layer Tommy Li works in. As co-founder of Native, he runs the liquidity and settlement infrastructure that sits underneath announcements like Mastercard’s — the unglamorous machinery of pre-funded capital, regulatory licensing, and round-the-clock execution that makes “always-on” something more than a marketing line.

In this conversation, he walks through what 24/7 settlement actually requires once you get past the press release: why banks and exchanges, despite being named partners in nearly every stablecoin announcement, aren’t structurally built to do this work, and why a dedicated middle layer of liquidity providers exists to fill that gap. He also explains why Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan — not the US markets named first in Mastercard’s rollout — are where this infrastructure is already being tested at scale, and what it will take to extend that model to corridors where the regulatory groundwork doesn’t yet exist.

What does 24/7 settlement actually change for merchants and cardholders?

For the customer, there won’t be many changes at all. The approval at checkout has always come back in a second, and it still does, whether the purchase happens on a weekday afternoon or a quiet Sunday morning.

The change comes after that, once the sale is done and the money moves between the banks.

Before, banks only settled up on working days, so a Friday-night payment would not move until Monday. Now it can clear over the weekend, with no wait at all.

The effect grows larger once you follow a payment from one country to another, where the money passes through several banks over a few days, and a company keeps cash parked the whole time as cover. As that delay shrinks, the cash that used to sit there idle comes back into circulation.

For me, that’s exactly how real adoption looks. The money does its job inside the normal flow of operations, and no one on the finance team has to think about the token that moves underneath it. When it works the way it should, you barely notice it is there at all.

What had to get built before a network like Mastercard could credibly offer this as a product feature?

None of this happens overnight, even if it looks that way. A network can only offer always-on settlement once the money behind it can move at any hour without friction, and that point arrived only after a long build that most people never saw.

A lot of it came down to connection. Regulated stablecoins had to connect to the card networks and payment apps people already use, so a balance could move through the same pipes as ordinary money, with no rebuild required on their side. The industry has put that groundwork in place over the past couple of years, quietly, one integration at a time.

What people underrate is the liquidity beneath it. Connection means little on its own because the moment a payment turns from cash into a stablecoin and back at real volume, the market needs enough depth to absorb it. Without that depth, the price slips and the experience that looked smooth starts to crack under the weight.

That is what makes a promise like this credible. The system holds only when deep liquidity and reliable execution stay ready behind every transaction, at any hour of any day. The part nobody sees turns out to be the part that decides whether the whole thing works.

How much capital has to sit idle to make “always-on” credible? Where does the tail risk land when there’s no clearing house absorbing it?

You have to hold enough to cover everything that might settle while the banks are closed. On a normal weekend, that is two days of volume left idle, and over a long holiday, it can stretch to three or four.

For an active cross-border book that ties up a real share of a month’s settlement at any moment, that could be millions of dollars for a smaller program and tens of millions for a large one, all of it pure cover the business holds back so a payment never stalls.

Continuous settlement changes that math. Once money can convert and move at any hour and a transaction reaches finality in seconds, the buffer no longer has to cover a worst-case weekend, so you size it to real exposure, and a lot of that dead capital comes back to work.

The tail risk ultimately sits with the stablecoin issuer and its reserve custodian — that is where the fundamental guarantee must hold. Our role is to provide the fiduciary and treasury infrastructure that enables clients to manage their exposure efficiently, within a fully regulated framework. We do not take principal risk; we help clients structure their operations so that settlement happens smoothly within the regulatory perimeter.

Who is actually moving liquidity between counterparties outside banking hours — and why aren’t banks or exchanges doing it?

The banks and the exchanges are both in these deals, just not in the part of the chain that matters here.

A bank issues, or it holds the reserves. An exchange supplies inventory. Neither of them is the one who moves liquidity between two counterparties at three in the morning.

Banks are not built to stand in the middle of a live settlement on a Sunday. They are closed when you need them most, and even when open, they move with a conservative risk appetite and technology that cannot always keep pace. We work with banks ourselves, and the honest ones will tell you they have no appetite to front capital into a live settlement at speed.

Exchanges have the inventory. What an exchange does is match buyers and sellers, and that is a different job from the one a settlement demands. The compliance checks, the settlement records, and the messy exceptions that always come up are not what a trading venue is there to handle.

That gap is the whole reason why we need a dedicated liquidity provider. Someone needs to ensure the capital is available at the right place and time, connected to banks, payment companies, and corporate systems. That is the infrastructure we provide as a licensed trust and company service provider — we structure the fiduciary and treasury framework so that our clients’ money moves efficiently, with all the proper controls in place.

Businesses want to keep their operations exactly as they are, and our job is to make the money move faster underneath them while nothing on their side has to change.

What has running this layer at Native required you to solve that you didn’t anticipate? What’s still missing from the market?

Most of what we built had little to do with liquidity itself. The capital side we understood early. The harder lesson was that payments, liquidity, and treasury cannot run as separate parts, so we brought them into a single system, with reconciliation and sanctions checks handled in the same place where the company already works.

We built our infrastructure so that, from the client’s perspective, digital assets integrate seamlessly into their normal treasury operations. Our role as a licensed TCSP is to provide the fiduciary framework and operational controls that make this possible.

Around 716 million people own crypto today, and only 40 to 70 million use it in a given month. The hundreds of millions in between hold something they never spend, and that is the gap nobody has closed.

This problem is only solved when those people can easily spend what they hold, when the stablecoin moves in the background, and no one has to think about the crypto at all. That is the unglamorous work we chose, and it is the only work that moves those numbers.

Where does the real operational proof-of-concept for this kind of settlement happen?

The proof is already in Asia, whatever the order of the launch announcements.

Most of the world’s real stablecoin payment volume runs through Singapore, Hong Kong, and Japan, somewhere near $245 billion. Each of the three gave stablecoins clear legal standing, and that is why the volume is there. Money at that scale only moves through a market that a business can trust.

The reason is partly the clock. Those markets are closed through Western working hours, so when a payment leaves Singapore on a Saturday, no Western bank is awake to clear the other side. That is where always-on settlement first earns its keep. It is also the rules, because all three treat stablecoins as proper payment instruments, supervised, audited, and redeemable.

The June changes brought those rulebooks close enough to test a corridor between them. The next phase plays out at the seams.

MAS, HKMA, and Japan’s FSA each take different approaches to reserves, licensing, and permissible issuers. What does that mean operationally for building settlement infrastructure across the corridor?

The differences matter more than people expect, because they mean no single rail clears the whole corridor. You build for three rulebooks side by side.

Each market sets its own terms for who may issue and what counts as a payment instrument. Hong Kong asks for a licence up front, Japan admits a foreign coin only after it passes a recognition test, and Singapore has built its rules around single-currency coins and the reserves behind them.

For anyone who runs a settlement, the job is to hold the right instrument and the right permission in each market, and to convert at the border between them. The coin that clears in Singapore does not automatically clear in Tokyo.

The common thread makes the work possible. All three insist on the same fundamentals: an issuer that answers to a regulator, full reserves behind the coin, and redemption on demand. The bar is high everywhere, so there is no weak link to design around.

What does it take to serve the Singapore–Hong Kong–Japan corridor reliably? How mature is the market right now?

It starts with capital in the right places. Liquidity has to sit ready at both ends, so when money leaves Tokyo for Singapore at midnight, the local currency is already there to meet it.

You also need real relationships with banks and payment firms in each market, because you cannot settle into Singapore or Japan without trusted partners on the ground.

The controls have to survive the crossing, too. A payment moves from a bank to a payment company to a corporate ledger, and on a corridor like this, it crosses borders too, so its compliance trail cannot break at any of those handoffs.

The market is young, and the demand inside it is already real. The cost of the old way drives that, since remittances still average more than 6%, and only about a third of cross-border payments arrive within an hour.

Stablecoins are the cheaper, faster way around that, though the real payment volume still came to only about $390 billion last year.

Where does Native’s infrastructure sit relative to what the market is demanding — and what’s the gap you’re still closing?

We sit at the quiet point where digital assets move through a company’s normal finance operations. The market wants precisely that.

Institutions are ready to use these assets. They just want a system that is predictable, secure, and built to fit how they already work.

Right now, the demand leans toward stablecoins and tokenized real-world assets. And when markets turn shaky, far more people want to off-ramp at once. That moment is our unfinished edge. On a normal day, we move the money cleanly, and the finance team never touches the crypto side.

The bad days are when we still have ground to make up. When volatility spikes and the money still has to move cleanly, untouched by hand, that is the hard part, and we close it with deeper liquidity and more automation.

Once Asia proves the model, what does global rollout require? What breaks when the regulatory framework isn’t there yet?

Global rollout will travel the same way the Asia corridor did — one licensed stretch at a time. The model only works where a real rulebook backs it, with a licensed issuer, reserves that hold, and a guaranteed way to redeem.

Europe’s MiCA rules now run in parallel with Asia’s, and that turns the Asia-to-Europe route into the first fully licensed stretch of its kind. Consistent choices by regulators bring these regimes together, while rules that stay too local leave each one solid on its own and joined to nothing.

Where no framework exists yet, the infrastructure has nothing to stand on. The issuer answers to no regulator, and the day the coin slips or its reserves come up short, there is no rule to lean on and no one who has to make you whole.

The risk and the capital you park against it climb fast, so you either stay out of that corridor or carry the danger yourself.

Five years out, I expect we’ll see significant adoption of digital asset infrastructure where regulatory frameworks are in place. The efficiency gains are real, but they depend on robust regulation.