As stablecoins and blockchain-based payments move closer to mainstream financial infrastructure, compliance is becoming less about screening individual transactions and more about understanding where money has been, who controls the destination and how funds move across networks. XREX Group’s Regulatory Excellence Award from the Asia FinTech Alliance highlights that shift, while its XRAY platform illustrates how on-chain intelligence is being positioned as a practical layer for fraud prevention and financial-crime investigations.

XREX’s Regulatory Award Highlights a New Battleground for Blockchain Finance

Blockchain-enabled financial institution XREX Group has won the Regulatory Excellence Award at the inaugural Asia FinTech Alliance (AFA) Awards, putting regulatory infrastructure and blockchain risk intelligence in the spotlight as digital assets become increasingly connected to conventional cross-border finance.

The award was presented following a final judging session in Taipei on September 1. XREX was selected from 88 corporate nominations across Asia-Pacific, with 30 companies advancing through an initial evaluation and 10 reaching the final round. Seven international judges assessed live presentations and conducted face-to-face Q&A before selecting winners across five categories. The AFA has members representing 16 Asian economies.

The recognition reflects XREX’s regulated operations in Taiwan and Singapore and its business spanning virtual-asset exchange, cross-border payments and regulatory technology.

More importantly, it illustrates how the compliance layer is becoming a competitive component of blockchain financial infrastructure.

Financial Crime Is Becoming a Cross-Border Infrastructure Problem

The financial-crime challenge facing digital finance is large enough that screening transactions in isolation is increasingly inadequate.

The Global Anti-Scam Alliance estimates that $442 billion was lost to scams across 42 surveyed markets, based on its 2025 global study. Seven in 10 adults surveyed said they had encountered a scam during the preceding 12 months.

Crypto markets add another layer of complexity because transactions can move across wallets, exchanges, chains and jurisdictions without following the same institutional boundaries as traditional banking.

TRM Labs estimated that approximately $35 billion in cryptocurrency was sent to fraud schemes during 2025. Its broader analysis put illicit crypto flows at roughly $158 billion for the year, although the latter figure includes multiple categories of illicit activity and should not be interpreted as fraud losses alone.

For regulated financial institutions, the implication is straightforward: knowing that a transaction occurred is not enough. Compliance teams increasingly need tools that can identify counterparties, assess wallet risk and reconstruct the movement of funds.

That is the problem XREX is targeting with XRAY.

XRAY Turns Blockchain Transparency Into a Compliance Tool

XREX developed XRAY as a wallet-risk screening and blockchain investigation platform. The company says users can enter a wallet address and, within about a second, identify associated platforms, risk information, on-chain labels and asset holdings before tracing fund flows for deeper investigation.

The product is aimed at a broad group of users, including financial institutions, virtual-asset service providers and law-enforcement agencies.

XREX’s own documentation describes XRAY as a tool for wallet identification, risk labeling and financial-flow tracking, with advanced functionality designed for compliance officers and investigators assessing suspicious transactions.

The significance is that blockchain’s public ledger becomes a source of investigative intelligence rather than merely a transaction record.

XREX has also added AI capabilities to help users interpret complex fund flows. That introduces another emerging layer to blockchain compliance: AI is being used not necessarily to replace risk analysts, but to make large volumes of on-chain information easier to interpret.

This is particularly relevant as illicit actors themselves adopt increasingly sophisticated technologies. TRM Labs says AI-generated multimedia and other generative-AI tools are already being used in fraud campaigns to create convincing personas, websites, branding and deepfake content.

Singapore and Taiwan Give XREX a Dual Regulatory Base

XREX’s regulatory strategy spans two important Asian financial markets.

Its Singapore operation runs XREX Pay under a Major Payment Institution licence and provides stablecoin-based business-to-business cross-border payment services. In Taiwan, XREX operates its virtual-asset exchange and has completed anti-money-laundering registration with the Financial Supervisory Commission.

That positioning puts the company at an intersection where regulators and financial institutions are increasingly focused: the movement between digital-asset networks and the regulated financial system.

Stablecoins are particularly important in this transition because they can provide faster cross-border settlement while still requiring financial institutions to manage sanctions, fraud, AML and counterparty risks.

TRM’s latest research shows just how significant stablecoins have become within crypto fraud. Stablecoins accounted for approximately 84% of verified fraud inflows in 2025, up from about 70% in 2024.

That does not mean stablecoins themselves are inherently illicit. Rather, it demonstrates why compliance infrastructure must evolve alongside legitimate adoption.

The Cost of Compliance Is Only One Part of the Equation

XREX co-founder and Group CEO Wayne Huang framed the issue around three categories of cost: technology and compliance spending, friction imposed on legitimate customers, and the broader loss of public trust when financial crime repeatedly reaches consumers.

That third category may become particularly important as financial services become more interconnected.

Every additional compliance check can create friction. But inadequate screening can expose a bank, payment provider or virtual-asset platform to much larger operational, regulatory and reputational consequences.

The technology challenge is therefore to improve detection without simply adding more manual reviews.

This is where blockchain analytics, risk scoring, graph analysis and AI-assisted investigation are beginning to converge.

From Crypto Compliance to Cross-Border Financial Infrastructure

XREX’s award comes at a time when blockchain compliance is evolving from a specialist crypto function into a broader financial-infrastructure requirement.

The next generation of cross-border payment systems will need to operate across conventional bank accounts, payment networks, stablecoins and blockchain wallets. That creates a common requirement for visibility across financial rails.

The AFA’s award structure reflects that regional shift. The inaugural awards included separate categories for cross-border fintech potential, financial infrastructure, regulatory excellence, market expansion and growth. Finmo, Liminal Custody, Liquid Group and PolicyStreet joined XREX as category winners.

For XREX, the Regulatory Excellence Award is therefore more than recognition for compliance investment. It points to a strategic proposition: risk intelligence can itself become financial infrastructure.

The long-term test will be whether tools such as XRAY can make cross-border finance safer without creating excessive friction—and whether data-sharing and investigative cooperation can keep pace as money moves across increasingly connected digital and traditional rails.

In that environment, compliance is no longer simply a control function operating after a transaction. It is becoming part of the architecture through which the transaction happens.

Market Landscape

The market for blockchain financial-crime technology is converging around several capabilities:

• Wallet screening: Identifying counterparties, platforms and risk indicators before transactions are completed.
• On-chain analytics: Following funds across wallets and blockchain networks to reconstruct financial activity.
• AML and sanctions monitoring: Applying traditional financial-crime controls to digital-asset transactions and counterparties.
• AI-assisted investigation: Summarizing complex transaction graphs and helping analysts identify potentially relevant patterns faster.
• Cross-border compliance infrastructure: Connecting risk intelligence across banks, payment institutions, VASPs and law-enforcement agencies.

The strategic challenge is interoperability. As stablecoins and tokenized assets move between regulated financial institutions and blockchain networks, compliance systems need visibility across both environments.

That makes blockchain analytics increasingly relevant to banks and payment companies that may not consider themselves crypto businesses.

Top Insights

• XREX won the inaugural AFA Regulatory Excellence Award, recognized for its regulated operations and three-part strategy across exchange, payments and RegTech.
• XRAY turns public blockchain data into risk intelligence, allowing institutions and investigators to identify wallets, assess risk and trace fund movements.
• Crypto fraud remains a major compliance challenge, with TRM Labs tracking approximately $35 billion sent to fraud schemes during 2025.
• AI is entering blockchain investigations, helping compliance teams interpret increasingly complex on-chain fund flows and transaction relationships.
• Cross-border finance needs common risk infrastructure, particularly as stablecoins connect traditional payment systems with blockchain-based settlement.

Get in touch with our fintech expert