WasabiCard Scales Global Creator Payouts with Stablecoin Infrastructure

The creator economy just got a new payment rail — and honestly, it's about time. Singapore-based WasabiCard is expanding its stablecoin-powered payout infrastructure for livestreaming businesses, agencies and creator-economy ops stretched across 200+ countries, with local fiat settlement in 30-plus currencies. We're talking payroll, host fees, affiliate commissions and freelance production costs — all running through one dashboard and one API. If you've ever watched a mid-tier agency try to wire a Filipino moderator and a Brazilian editor in the same week, you already know why this is a quiet W for the back office.

What they're actually shipping

The pitch — pulled from the Sept. 3 announcement carried by Business Insider — is brutally practical. Businesses can fund payment operations with stablecoins, then push bulk payouts through the WasabiCard platform or its API. Funds convert into local fiat and land directly in bank accounts under the recipient's name through whatever local rails exist in that market. Virtual and physical cards handle the day-to-day creator and production spending on the way out, and the whole thing plugs into existing payroll or creator-management workflows rather than asking finance teams to rip and replace.

Five buckets of spend they're targeting, per the release: regional team payroll for ops, business development and account managers; host and creator payouts for livestream appearances, campaigns, performance bonuses and recurring engagements; affiliate commissions and revenue-share splits handled in batches instead of one-by-one; freelance production payments to moderators, translators, editors, designers and livestream ops; and the boring-but-important bucket of business expenses — travel, gear, software, ads and content production — folded into the same infrastructure.

Co-founder and CEO Ray Yang said in the announcement that the globalization of the creator economy is changing how businesses manage money — his framing is essentially that stablecoins handle the global liquidity side, and local payment infrastructure is what actually gets the funds to the people who need to be paid. Connect those two layers, he argues, and global payouts stop being a special project and start being a Tuesday.

Why creators should care, even if you never touch a B2B dashboard

The spicy lane for our side of the stream is the "host and creator payouts" bucket — performance bonuses, campaign fees, recurring engagements, the kind of money that used to bounce through three different processors and lose a percentage point at every hop. For agencies running rosters across LATAM, SEA, MENA and Eastern Europe, that operational headache has been a real grind, and historically it's also where creators quietly get shorted on timing or fees without anyone meaning to be malicious — wires get delayed, FX eats margins, and the smaller talent on the roster just… waits.

The wider context, and what we're watching

This isn't happening in a vacuum. X just moved US creator payouts to an internal "X Money" platform, Later announced cumulative creator payouts over $300 million and folded its Mavely affiliate arm under the Later brand, and CreatorFi raised $45 million to chase creators with so-called cult-like audiences. The rails are getting built — and they're getting built fast across very different models.

The open question worth sitting with: does any of this actually translate to faster, cleaner money in creator wallets, or does it just give finance teams prettier dashboards while the W/L community on payout day stays exactly the same? And while these platforms sort out who gets paid and how, the streamers crossing into pop and rap stardom are quietly rewriting what a music career even looks like — that crossover is its own kind of payout story, and it's the one we'll be tracking next.