Somewhere in Kuala Lumpur tonight, a worker will try to send money home. Through a bank or a remittance shop, it will cost a painful slice of the amount, and it may take days.
The World Bank’s own long-running measure puts the global average cost of sending money across borders at around six per cent, and higher still in the costliest corridors. For a family counting every ringgit, that is a cruel tax on love.
Now there is another way, and it is spreading fast. It is called a stablecoin, a digital token pegged one to one to a currency, almost always the US dollar. One token, one dollar, held in a phone wallet, sent to another wallet in minutes, often for a fee well under 1 per cent, once both sides are set up. For the person sending that money, this is not a crypto gamble. It is a lifeline.
Sit with that for a moment, though, and a second story appears beneath the first.
When millions of people across our region send, save, and receive value in dollars, quietly, one app at a time, something larger is happening. They are stepping, gently and without ever deciding to, outside their own currency.
Economists have a name for it. Currency substitution, or in plainer words, dollarisation, when a nation’s people drift into using a foreign currency in place of their own. It has happened before in troubled economies, always through cash and banks. What is new is that it can now happen through an app, invisibly, at the speed of a text message.
The scale is no longer small. Some industry estimates put stablecoin transfer volume in 2024 at around 27 trillion US dollars, above the combined throughput of Visa and Mastercard. Around 99 per cent of these tokens are pegged to the US dollar, with local-currency versions under one per cent, and Asia-Pacific is now among the fastest-growing regions for their use. Treat the exact figures as approximate, but the direction is not in doubt. The world is quietly building a new layer of money, and it is being built in dollars.
Here is why this matters for us, in three plain points.
First, the good is real, and we should say so plainly. Cheaper, faster remittances lift real families. A worker keeping an extra few per cent of every payment sent home is not an abstraction. That is school fees, medicine, a roof.
Second, the quiet cost is real too. A central bank, our Bank Negara, steers the economy through the ringgit. It sets interest rates, cushions shocks, decides how money flows. But it can only steer the money it governs. If a growing share of everyday value moves in dollar tokens, Bank Negara steers a smaller slice of the real economy, and we import another country’s monetary decisions without ever voting for them. This is not science fiction. In March 2026, staff at the United States Federal Reserve published an analysis of exactly this, of how large-scale stablecoin use by ordinary people and small banks could reshape a central bank’s grip on its own money.
Third, our own regulator is already awake to it, and that is the encouraging part. In February 2026, Bank Negara Malaysia onboarded three wholesale pilots for ringgit-backed stablecoins and tokenised deposits under its Digital Asset Innovation Hub, working with several major banks, with clearer guidance expected by the end of 2026. Ringgit-pegged and tokenised-deposit pilots are now being trialled in that sandbox, and they also weigh selected Shariah considerations. Malaysia, in other words, is not asleep. It has started to build the local answer.
So what is the lesson?
The threat to the ringgit was never the wild, headline crypto everyone was warned about. It is the calm, useful, dollar-shaped kind, precisely because it works so well that people adopt it without a second thought. And the answer is not to ban it, which fails everywhere it is tried. The answer is to build our own, and build it well.
Four moves would turn this from a risk into an advantage.
First, carry through what Bank Negara has started, and carry it through quickly. A trusted, ringgit-backed digital money, cheap and instant, hands the rakyat every benefit of a stablecoin while keeping the money, and the control, at home.
Second, make it cheaper to send a ringgit than a dollar. Adoption follows convenience, not patriotism. If our own rails are the fastest, cheapest way to move money home, people will choose them freely.
Third, play to a strength few others have. Malaysia is a global hub of Islamic finance. A Shariah-compliant ringgit digital money is a product few can build with our credibility, and much of the world would want it. Bank Negara’s own trials already weigh Shariah considerations. Lean in.
Fourth, protect the rakyat while we build. Clear rules on reserves, redemption and disclosure, so that a token marked one ringgit is always worth one ringgit. Trust is the entire product.
None of this asks us to fear the future. It asks us to shape it.
The dollar will not march into Malaysia behind a flag. It will arrive, if we let it, one helpful little payment at a time, welcomed by people simply trying to send money home. The good news is that we saw it early, and we have begun to answer. The task now is to be quicker, and braver, than the drift.
Because the currency in your child’s phone, a decade from now, should still say ringgit.
Ts Dr Manju Appathurai holds dual PhDs in Artificial Intelligence (2026) and Crisis Economics, is a licensed clinical psychologist and Licensed Technologist (Ts), and is the founding principal of Mahat Advisory and a strategic adviser to the Dutch Coalition for Defence and Security (Malaysia).
The views expressed here are the personal opinion of the writer and do not represent that of Twentytwo13.
