Singapore-based crypto and blockchain payments infrastructure platform Xweave has integrated Solana’s settlement layer into its institutional treasury product. The company announced the update at the Point Zero Forum in Zurich on June 24. This move targets one of corporate treasury’s oldest structural problems: the need to pre-fund accounts in multiple jurisdictions just to move money across borders in real time.
The Scale of the Pre-Funding Problem in APAC
Cross-border treasury inefficiency is a major problem for corporates. Industry estimates point to roughly $10 trillion locked globally in pre-funded accounts. The latter businesses maintain to support cross-border payment flows, representing what one calls a massive liquidity drain on the legacy financial system. The mechanics behind that figure are familiar to any treasury team operating across multiple currencies. Capital trapped in local accounts reduces overall working capital utilization and increases funding costs, while correspondent banks have to hold larger instant-available balances since the 2008 financial crisis, making cross-border settlement structurally more expensive.
Asia Pacific carries disproportionate weight in that multi-billion figure. The region accounts for roughly 35% of global payment flows. Besides, it generated over 40% of the more than $200 billion in global cross-border payments revenue in 2021, according to McKinsey’s Global Payments Map. In this environment, it is no wonder that APAC regional banks reliant on correspondent networks also face structural cost disadvantages. McKinsey benchmarks show these banks carry an average cost-to-serve roughly 50% higher than fintech competitors, often while sitting on trapped liquidity across institutions they rarely use.
Xweave’s announcement frames the same dynamic in operational terms. Intraday FX positions and subsidiary cash sweeps between Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines take hours or days to settle under correspondent banking rails, tying up pre-funded balances in the process. Blockchain is increasingly seen as a valid tool to finally solve the issue.
“The conversation with corporate treasury teams has fundamentally shifted. Two years ago, the question was whether blockchain had any role in institutional settlement. Today, the question is how quickly they can integrate it – because the cost and speed gap versus traditional rails is simply too wide to ignore. Xweave gives treasury teams the answer: a compliant, auditable, production-ready pathway that works with their existing workflows, not against them.”
Jeannie Lim, Co-founder, Xweave
Intelligent Routing as the Core Mechanism
The feature distinguishing Xweave from single-rail competitors is its Intelligent Rate Routing engine, which the company built to be both asset-agnostic and network-agnostic. Rather than committing transactions to one stablecoin or one blockchain, the routing layer evaluates available settlement paths across regulated stablecoins and multiple networks at the point of execution. Upon analysis, which despite the complexity takes seconds, the smart routing engine selects whichever route is most cost-efficient while preserving full price transparency for the client. Fabric Ventures general partner Anil Hansjee, an investor in Xweave’s 2025 seed round, described the mechanism as one that lets the company optimize flows without pre-funding while addressing the fragmentation building up across networks, liquidity pools, and local-currency stablecoins.
That design is paired with what the company calls a plug-and-play integration model. Institutional clients connect funding, receiving, settlement, and KYC information-sharing into a single workflow through one payment orchestration API, rather than stitching together separate banking, compliance, and FX integrations market by market.
“Corporate treasuries in APAC are managing multi-currency cash positions across jurisdictions that have historically required significant pre-funding and operational overhead. We built Xweave to change that. Solana gives us the settlement layer – sub-second finality, programmable execution, and near-zero cost – while Xweave provides the compliant orchestration that treasury teams and their banks actually require. Together, we are making real-time cross-border treasury a practical reality, not a pilot project.”
Milind Sanghavi, Co-Founder & CEO, Xweave
On the distribution side, Xweave’s architecture extends past bank accounts: recipients can also receive money into e-wallets or via over-the-counter cash pickup points, depending on what is available or preferred in the destination market. That is a highly relevant detail in corridors like Indonesia and the Philippines, where banking penetration and digital wallet adoption vary widely.
Funding and Company Background
Xweave was founded in 2024 by Milind Sanghavi, a payments industry veteran with prior roles at Meta, PayPal, Visa, Ezetap, and OCBC, alongside co-founder Jeannie Lim. The company raised a $3 million seed round in May 2025. It was led by Jungle Ventures through its First Cheque@Jungle initiative alongside crypto investment firm Lightshift. Menyala, the venture studio founded by Temasek that had incubated the company, provided follow-on investment, with additional participation from White Star Capital, Fabric Ventures, Digital Currency Group, The Venture Dept., and several angels.
The seed round was earmarked for expansion into non-G10 payment corridors across Asia and the Middle East, the same UAE, Indonesia, Japan, and Hong Kong markets named in this week’s Solana announcement, suggesting the integration represents the execution phase of a roadmap set out roughly a year earlier. Xweave had begun processing live payments between Singapore and the Philippines in December 2024, before this week’s announcement extended the network to treasury-specific use cases: liquidity sweeps, FX settlement, and trade finance disbursement.
Why Solana Among Other Blockchains?
Solana is not the network most associated with institutional stablecoin volume. That distinction still belongs to Ethereum and Tron, which together continue to command the lion’s share of global stablecoin supply. But for treasury use cases specifically, where transactions need to clear continuously and cheaply throughout the day, Solana’s specific performance profile has drawn a growing list of institutional pilots.
The appeal centers on two figures: speed and cost. Solana’s finality performance currently sits at roughly 0.4 seconds, with the network aiming to push that down to 0.15 seconds, alongside transaction fees that run below $0.01, according to Solana Foundation’s Head of Institutional Growth, Nick Ducoff. For high-frequency operations like repeated daily settlement sweeps, that combination makes Solana a more practical fit than Ethereum mainnet, where fees and confirmation times run considerably higher. In recent years, major payment companies have linked their stablecoin activities specifically with Solana chain. E.g.:
- Crypto-based online travel ticketing service Travala partnered with Solana blockchain to enable travellers to book hotels and flights using Solana tokens along with some major stablecoins.
- PayPal’s stablecoin, PayPal USD (PYUSD), debuted on the Solana blockchain.
- Western Union moved to modernize international money transfers by the launch of its USDPT stablecoin on Solana network.
- Meta started paying a select group of creators with USDC, a stablecoin issued by Circle, on the Solana and Polygon blockchain networks.
- The latest initiatives extended beyond purely crypto play into the emerging realm of agentic payments. Thus, the Solana Foundation and Google Cloud have recently launched Pay.sh, a payment gateway that lets AI agents access and pay for APIs using stablecoins on Solana.
“Solana’s enterprise-ready infrastructure makes programmable settlement practical for corporate treasury teams operating across Asia Pacific and globally – we’re thrilled to see teams like Xweave’s choose Solana.”
Anna Zhang, APAC Growth Lead, Solana Foundation
South Korea’s Toss Bank reached a similar conclusion when evaluating networks for its own cross-border settlement proof of concept earlier this year: the bank specifically cited Solana’s transaction finality speed and low transaction costs as reasons to test the network. Other regional institutions have moved in the same direction, e.g. Singapore Gulf Bank demonstrated stablecoin issuance on Solana at the Breakpoint 2025 conference, while DBS Bank has noted institutional client interest in the network.
The broader institutional pattern lends some context to Xweave’s choice. Solana’s enterprise integrations now span Citi’s trade finance proof-of-concept work, SoFi’s native deposit infrastructure, B2C2’s stablecoin settlement activity, and a memorandum of understanding with South Korea’s Shinhan Card, alongside existing relationships with Mastercard, Worldpay, and Western Union. Visa has also moved settlement infrastructure onto the network: the payments giant expanded its USDC settlement support to Solana specifically to increase cross-border transfer speed and cut costs.
