Pangea Strategic Brief
Internal Use & Investor Presentation

The
Stablecoin
Layer

How we monetize USDC across the marketplace, the remittance corridor, the capital layer, and the infrastructure licensing model — and who we need to partner with to make it real.

Author
Poppet Celdrán
Role
Founder & CEO, BridgeTech Labs, Inc.
Date
August 2026
Classification
Confidential — Internal Only

I wrote this as a shared team brief — our collective understanding of the stablecoin opportunity inside Pangea. This is not a pitch document for outsiders. It is a working document for us: to align on, present from, and return to as the business grows. When every one of us can explain every section without looking at it, we understand our own business deeply enough to defend it in any room.

Our Core Frame

We are not building a payment method.
We are building a margin layer.

Before we can explain where the money comes from, we need to establish the right mental model. This is the single most important reframe we carry into every conversation about stablecoins.

Most founders who try to integrate stablecoins treat them as a front-end payment method — something buyers tap to checkout. That framing is wrong for SariKo and wrong for Pangea. It creates regulatory surface area at the wrong stage, confuses the user experience, and completely misses where the actual profit lives.

The correct frame is this: every time money moves across a border inside our ecosystem and we control the rail, we have four simultaneous revenue opportunities. The fee on the move. The float while it sits. The yield on the float. And the data generated by the movement. Traditional fiat rails like VNPay or Wise give us only the first one. USDC gives us all four — quietly, invisibly, and at institutional scale.

"The marketplace generates transactions. The stablecoin layer monetizes the movement between them."
SariKo in HCMC and QuêTôi in Seoul generate commerce inside their communities. But when a Korean buyer purchases from a Filipino seller — when earnings move from VND to PHP — that cross-border movement is where the stablecoin layer turns on. USDC is the invisible bridge. Pangea earns on the bridge.
What fiat rails give us
Transaction fee (charged to buyer or seller)
Fixed settlement window with no optionality
Float earns nothing while it sits
Single corridor, single provider, single rate
Data exists but is fragmented across third-party rails
What USDC gives us additionally
Float yield on idle USDC (4 to 5 percent APY through Circle)
FX spread capture on corridor conversion both ways
Smart contract escrow protocol fee (0.1 to 0.25 percent)
Offramp routing arbitrage — always take the cheapest path
Full payment behavior data owned inside Pangea forever
01
Revenue Surface 01 Marketplace Settlement Layer

The money we make before any user even knows stablecoins are involved.

This is the first surface we activate and the lowest risk one. It operates entirely inside Pangea's corporate treasury. No user faces a USDC prompt. No regulatory approval from any consumer financial authority is required. We are simply making our internal settlement infrastructure smarter.

When a buyer pays in VND through VNPay and a seller collects, that money sits in escrow between the moment of order placement and the moment of settlement. Today that float earns nothing. Once USDC becomes our inter-node settlement rail between HCMC and Seoul, that float becomes a yield asset we can deploy through Circle's reserve program while we wait for settlement to clear.

🏦
Float Yield on Escrow
4–5% APY
Idle USDC between order placement and settlement is deployed in Circle's reserve program. At $500,000 average daily float, this generates $20,000 to $25,000 per year with zero user-facing change. This activates as soon as USDC is operational.
↔️
FX Spread on Cross-Node Settlement
0.5% per leg
When a Korean buyer on UriZip purchases from a Filipino seller on SariKo, the transaction converts KRW to USDC on one end and USDC to VND on the other. The spread between those two conversions belongs to Pangea. Wise built a $9 billion company on this same model.
🔗
Smart Contract Escrow Protocol Fee
0.1–0.25%
Every cross-node order that settles in USDC passes through a Pangea escrow contract. A small protocol fee on top of the marketplace commission is invisible at the order level but compounds substantially at volume. This is exactly how Stripe built its treasury business.

Why we love this surface: None of these three streams require us to market a financial product to a user. They are infrastructure decisions we make inside BridgeTech Labs, Inc. and Zen Tech Asia. The buyer still pays in VND. The seller still receives in VND or PHP. USDC is the pipe they never see. The yield, spread, and protocol fee are ours at every transaction. This is the ideal first activation point — maximum margin, minimum complexity, zero regulatory surface area on the consumer side.

02
Revenue Surface 02 Remittance & Cross-Border Payout Layer

The most emotionally resonant pitch to our sellers — and our clearest competitive wedge.

Every Filipino seller on SariKo eventually wants one thing: to send their earnings home to their family in the Philippines. Today they use Western Union, Remitly, or informal channels. We have an opportunity to make that corridor cheaper, faster, and integrated directly into their SariKo dashboard. That is Pangea Pay.

"The OFW remittance corridor from Vietnam to the Philippines is estimated at $180 million to $220 million annually. Western Union charges 4 to 7 percent. Wise charges 0.5 to 1 percent. We can charge 0.5 percent too — and we have something neither of them has: we already know the seller, her transaction history, and her earnings cycle."

Because we control the marketplace and the payout, we can offer 0.5 percent corridor pricing to any seller who clears their income through SariKo and uses Pangea Pay to remit home. The seller wins because it is cheaper than any alternative they currently use. We win because we capture the remittance fee and the float on the transfer — often 48 to 72 hours of float earning yield.

The second stream in this surface is what we call the earned income sweep. When a seller earns $300 in a week on SariKo, she currently withdraws to a VND bank account. With Pangea Wallet, we offer her the option to hold her earnings in USDC inside her Pangea account, earning 3 to 4 percent yield, and remit on demand. She gets a savings product with no Philippine bank friction. We earn the spread between what Circle pays us on the pooled balance and what we pass to her.

🌏
Pangea Pay Remittance Fee
0.5% per transfer
VN to PH corridor. Cheaper than Western Union. Integrated into the seller's payout dashboard. The seller does not need to open a separate app — it is already where she manages her storefront.
💎
Pangea Wallet Yield Spread
~1.5% net margin
We earn 4.5 to 5.5 percent APY on pooled USDC through Circle and pass 3 to 4 percent to the seller. The 1 to 1.5 percent spread is recurring, passive income generated from sellers who trust Pangea enough to hold their earnings here.
Offramp Routing Arbitrage
Variable margin capture
When a seller sweeps earnings to the Philippines, we route USDC through whichever offramp offers the best rate at that moment — GCash, UnionBank, or a DEX — capturing the best spread rather than committing to a fixed provider. This requires a treasury management function but is achievable by Year 2.

This surface is the community story: When we speak to sellers and to the diaspora community, we do not lead with USDC or stablecoins. We lead with the offer: "Your SariKo earnings can go home to your family in the Philippines at a fraction of what you pay Western Union today, directly from your seller dashboard." The stablecoin is the infrastructure. The promise is the pitch. The margin is ours.

03
Revenue Surface 03 Pangea Capital

The highest-margin, highest-moat stream in the entire architecture.

This is the stream that turns Pangea from a good marketplace into an extraordinary financial company. And it is the one that requires no external marketing at all — because we already have the asset that makes it work: six months of verified transaction history for every seller on the platform.

Filipino and Vietnamese sellers in HCMC are largely invisible to banks and credit bureaus. They have no FICO score, no formal credit file, no relationship with BPI or Vietcombank's retail lending desk. But after six months on SariKo, Teresa has a verifiable GMV record, an order completion rate, a repeat buyer ratio, and a payment history going back to her first order. That is a credit file. We built it. We own it. No bank has it.

This is exactly the model Shopify Capital uses. They underwrite merchants using Shopify transaction history rather than a credit bureau. Shopify Capital generated $5.2 billion in merchant loans in its most recent fiscal year. The product is not a bet — it is a proven architecture. We are applying it to a population that has never been served by it before.

Element The Pangea Capital Model Revenue Implication
Funding source Borrow USDC from Circle facility or crypto lending desk at 6 to 8 percent Our cost of capital
Lending rate to sellers 18 to 24 percent APR — below Philippine informal lending (30 to 60%) 12–18% gross spread
Origination fee 1 to 2 percent charged upfront on each loan Immediate cash on origination
Repayment mechanism Automated deductions from marketplace settlement. No collection risk. Lower default rate than any bank
Default protection Suspend seller storefront for non-payment — a lever no bank has Structural moat in underwriting
Underwriting moat My transaction data. No external bureau needed. Impossible to replicate at speed. Data is the durable competitive advantage

Commission is a 15 percent slice of a single transaction. Capital is an 18 percent annual claim on the seller's entire working capital need. This is why the marketplace is the trojan horse and the financial infrastructure is the castle. The marketplace gets Teresa onboard. The capital product turns Teresa into a recurring, high-margin revenue relationship for the lifetime of her business.

04
Revenue Surface 04 Infrastructure Licensing

The moment Pangea becomes a platform for platforms.

Once we have proven that USDC settlement works cleanly across the HCMC to Seoul corridor and we have transaction history across ten or more nodes, the rails themselves become the product. This is Phase 3 — and we are making technology decisions now that will determine whether this is achievable later.

Other diaspora commerce communities — Indian, Indonesian, Nigerian, West African — face the exact same cross-border settlement problem we are solving for the Filipino and Vietnamese communities. They do not want to build USDC settlement infrastructure from scratch. We will have already built and battle-tested it. We license it.

This is the City License model applied to financial infrastructure. A flat licensing fee plus a per-transaction royalty on all volume settled through the Pangea rail. The parallel is direct: the same way a City License operator deploys SariKo's community commerce playbook in a new geography, a financial infrastructure license deploys Pangea's USDC settlement rails in a new diaspora vertical.

🔧
B2B API — Diaspora Settlement Rail
License fee + royalty
Other diaspora apps and OFW platforms access Pangea's USDC settlement infrastructure through a licensed API. Flat annual fee plus a per-transaction royalty on all volume settled through the Pangea rail.
📊
Diaspora Credit Data as a Service
Data licensing revenue
Anonymized, aggregated diaspora credit scores and payment behavior data licensed to rural banks, microfinance institutions, and central banks studying OFW remittance patterns. GDPR-compliant. This is the data monetization layer applied specifically to financial behavior.
💳
Pangea Card — Interchange Revenue
1.5–2% interchange per swipe
A prepaid Visa or Mastercard funded by the seller's Pangea Wallet USDC balance. We earn interchange on every transaction — the same model that Revolut and Wise use to generate recurring revenue from their card products.

Why we design for this now even though it activates in Year 3: The technology architecture we build for Surfaces 1 through 3 either supports API licensing or it does not. If we build settlement as a closed internal system, we cannot open it later without a full rebuild. If we build it as a modular, API-first rail from the beginning, licensing is a configuration decision, not an engineering project. Tri and I lock in this decision now as founders — not in Year 3.

Our Priority Sequencing

What we activate, and when.

Not all four surfaces activate at the same time. The sequencing is driven by regulatory exposure, technical dependency, and the amount of transaction history we need before a product is credible. Here is how we think about the timeline.

Phase 1
Now — Year 1
Post VNPay Activation
Float yield on marketplace escrow (zero user-facing change required)
FX spread capture begins at Seoul to HCMC corridor launch
Smart contract escrow protocol fee embedded at order settlement
Circle institutional partnership agreement signed
Phase 2
Year 2
Post GMV Threshold
Pangea Pay remittance corridor live (VN to PH)
Pangea Wallet launched with USDC yield sharing
Pangea Capital pilot with first 20 sellers (6 months of transaction history required)
Offramp routing arbitrage engine live
Phase 3
Year 3 and Beyond
Post Series A
B2B API settlement rail licensing to other diaspora platforms
Diaspora credit data licensing to banks and MFIs
Pangea Card (prepaid Visa or Mastercard) for wallet holders
Full Pangea Capital scale with external debt facility
Partner Intelligence

The relationships we need to build, by country.

The stablecoin layer does not operate in a vacuum. Every surface requires a counterparty — someone who holds a license we do not yet have, operates a rail we need access to, or serves a community we need to reach. Here is the full partner map organized by geography.

🇵🇭
Philippines
Offramp, regulatory umbrella, capital product, and the most likely acquirer base
GCash / Mynt
E-Money Issuer · Potential Acquirer
90 million users. BSP e-money license covering the VN to PH corridor. The most important offramp for every Filipino seller sending earnings home. A commercial partnership now sets the relationship for a Series B acquisition conversation. This is one of our three most logical acquirers alongside Wise and Sea Group.
Surface 02 — Remittance Exit Narrative
Coins.ph
Virtual Asset Service Provider
The only Philippine entity holding both a BSP VASP license and a live USDC integration. If we want to receive and disburse USDC in the Philippines without our own VASP license, Coins.ph is our regulatory umbrella. This partnership removes the single biggest Philippine regulatory hurdle for the stablecoin layer.
Surface 01 — Settlement Surface 02 — Remittance
UnionBank Philippines
Commercial Bank · Digital Asset Pioneer
Most progressive Philippine bank on digital assets. Launched PHX (peso stablecoin) in 2022 and holds a crypto custody framework. A UnionBank partnership gives us a banking-licensed counterparty for the Pangea Capital lending product in the Philippines without us needing to hold a Philippine lending license ourselves.
Surface 03 — Pangea Capital Regulatory Cover
Maya (formerly PayMaya)
Digital Bank · VASP License Holder
BSP digital banking license plus a crypto VASP. More consumer-focused than UnionBank — better fit for the Pangea Wallet product targeting OFW sellers who want a mobile-first savings experience. Serves the same demographic SariKo already attracts.
Surface 02 — Pangea Wallet
BSP Regulatory Sandbox
Bangko Sentral ng Pilipinas
BSP's FinTech Regulatory Sandbox Framework allows a platform to operate a stablecoin remittance corridor for up to 12 months without a full VASP license while gathering data. Rico Mariano's DTI connection is already active — that warm government relationship is the entry point for a BSP sandbox conversation.
Regulatory Sandbox All Surfaces
OFBank
Government Bank for OFWs
Specifically mandated to serve overseas Filipino workers. A partnership for credit products targeting OFW sellers gives us a government-backed counterparty for Pangea Capital in the Philippines — and a powerful co-branding story for the community.
Surface 03 — Pangea Capital
🇻🇳
Vietnam
Operating base, primary settlement node, and the regulatory frontier we navigate carefully
Circle (USDC Issuer)
Global Infrastructure · Priority #1
Circle is technically a global partner but the Vietnam relationship is where it matters most because Zen Tech Asia is our operating entity. A direct Circle partnership gives us institutional USDC yield on our float (4.5 to 5.5 percent), compliance documentation we can show the State Bank of Vietnam, and B2B USDC settlement rails for the inter-node architecture. Everything in our stablecoin stack runs on USDC. The entity that issues USDC is therefore our foundational infrastructure partner.
All Surfaces First Call to Make
MoMo (M_Service)
E-Wallet · B2B Settlement
Already in our payout rail plan. The deeper partnership is MoMo Business, which has B2B settlement capabilities and is piloting cross-border payment corridors. MoMo has raised from Warburg Pincus and Goldman Sachs — making them a credible institutional counterparty for a formal corridor partnership agreement, not just a payout integration.
Surface 01 — Settlement Surface 02 — Remittance
Techcombank
Commercial Bank · Digital Asset Pioneer
Vietnam's most digitally sophisticated commercial bank and the most aggressive in testing digital asset settlement. A Techcombank treasury account relationship gives me the most credible Vietnamese banking counterparty for my USDC float custody on the Vietnamese side of every transaction.
Surface 01 — Float Custody
Cake by VPBank
Digital Bank · Mobile-First
VPBank is already my operating bank. The deeper relationship to build is with VPBank's digital banking arm, Cake, which targets the same mobile-first demographic as my sellers. A co-branded seller savings product with Cake is achievable within 12 months and gives me a regulated Vietnamese deposit product without requiring a banking license.
Surface 02 — Pangea Wallet
State Bank of Vietnam
Central Bank · Regulatory
We cannot rush this relationship but we cannot ignore it either. Vietnam is formalizing its digital asset framework incrementally. Our safest path is to maintain all consumer-facing operations within the VNPay fiat rail while documenting our USDC use as internal inter-node settlement between our own corporate entities. Phuong's compliance work is already laying the groundwork for this framing.
Regulatory Navigation
Trusting Social
AI Credit Scoring
Vietnamese AI company specializing in alternative credit scoring for the unbanked and thin-file population. A partnership for Pangea Capital's underwriting model in Vietnam — they bring the credit infrastructure, we bring the transaction data. Together the product is stronger than either alone.
Surface 03 — Pangea Capital
🇰🇷
Korea
Second node anchor, cross-border settlement, and the gateway to Eurostars and GCC VC credibility
Kakao Pay
Payment Platform · 40M+ Users
Korea's dominant payment app and our primary buyer-side payment rail for QuêTôi and UriZip. When a Korean buyer purchases from a Vietnamese or Filipino seller, KakaoPay is how they pay in KRW. Kakao Pay also invested in Grab Financial Group — that shared investor relationship is a warm introduction angle for a commercial partnership conversation.
Surface 01 — Settlement Surface 02 — Cross-Node
Toss (Viva Republica)
Fintech Unicorn · Digital Bank
Korean internet banking license and active cross-border transfer rails. Their user base (25 to 40 years old, mobile-native, income-earning) is the exact demographic that would use UriZip and SariKo's Seoul node. The commercial partnership conversation and the investor conversation can be initiated simultaneously — Toss has a corporate venture arm that invests in fintech infrastructure.
Surface 01 — Settlement Surface 02 — Remittance
Hana Bank
Commercial Bank · Global OFW Focus
The most strategically important Korean banking relationship in the long run. Hana has the most active overseas Korean community banking program of any Korean bank, with dedicated branches in HCMC and Manila. They have existing remittance corridors between Korea, Vietnam, and the Philippines. Hana Digital Asset also provides KRW to USDC conversion infrastructure — exactly what we need on the Korean side of the corridor.
Surface 02 — Remittance Surface 03 — Capital
Dunamu (Upbit)
Virtual Asset Exchange · VASP Licensed
Korea's largest crypto exchange and our USDC custody and conversion partner for the Korean node. Korean VASP license, institutional USDC liquidity, and B2B fintech partnership ambitions beyond retail trading. If we need to hold or convert USDC on the Korean side, Dunamu is our regulated counterparty.
Surface 01 — USDC Custody Surface 02 — Corridor
Korea Money Express (KME)
Informal Remittance Network
The dominant informal remittance operator for the Filipino community in Korea — especially in manufacturing cities like Ansan and Cheongju. They operate through the informal padala network. If we can offer KME's customer base a structured, lower-cost alternative with better tracking and buyer protection through SariKo, that is a direct community acquisition channel. This is the Korean equivalent of our church-based seller acquisition model in HCMC.
Surface 02 — Remittance Community Channel
KAIST Finance Dept.
Research Institution
Active in diaspora fintech research. A partnership with KAIST serves two purposes simultaneously: it provides academic credibility for the Pangea Capital underwriting model, and it satisfies the Korean research institution co-applicant requirement for the Eurostars R&D grant targeted at the March 2027 call. One relationship, two strategic payoffs.
Eurostars Grant Surface 04 — Data
The One Action We Take Now

Before we pursue any of the relationships above — we reach out to Circle first.

Of everything in this partner map, the single highest-leverage relationship to initiate today — before any other — is a direct institutional partnership agreement with Circle, the issuer of USDC.

Circle is not just a payment company. They are the foundational infrastructure on which our entire stablecoin stack runs. A Circle partnership gives us three things simultaneously: institutional USDC yield on our float (the Phase 1 revenue that activates immediately), the compliance documentation and BSP-facing and SBV-facing materials we need for regulatory conversations in both the Philippines and Vietnam, and the B2B USDC settlement API that powers the inter-node architecture between HCMC and Seoul.

Everything else in this document — GCash, Coins.ph, Kakao Pay, Toss, Dunamu — is a counterparty that sits on top of the USDC rail. The USDC rail itself is Circle. We initiate the Circle conversation first, position Pangea as a high-growth diaspora commerce platform generating cross-border payment volume in three of the most underserved corridors in Southeast Asia, and we build everything else on top of that foundation.

That conversation costs nothing to start. Circle actively recruits marketplace platforms that generate diaspora payment volume. And from the moment we have that agreement in hand, every other partnership in this document becomes easier to negotiate — because we are no longer asking to join a rail. We are already the rail.