Cregis: Shawn Yan and the Digital Asset Infrastructure Built to Institutional Standards

Much of the attention in digital assets goes to prices, tokens and exchanges. Far less goes to the plumbing underneath: the wallets, custody and payment rails that businesses rely on to move funds safely, every day, under very different regulators. Cregis, the Hong Kong-headquartered company founded and led by Shawn Yan, has spent nine years building that layer. It is a nominee in the Finance & Insurance category of the TPC Awards 2026.

Infrastructure, not features

Founded in 2017, Cregis provides enterprise digital asset infrastructure. Its products span Wallet-as-a-Service, fund-flow orchestration through Cregis Flow and Rails, a Payment Engine and institutional custody. The clients are businesses rather than individuals: licensed financial institutions, foreign-exchange brokers, payment service providers, OTC desks, digital banks, crypto exchanges and wider fintech.

That positioning is deliberate. By sitting at the infrastructure layer rather than offering a single feature, Cregis becomes part of how a client's business actually settles and moves money. Those relationships tend to be longer-term and harder to displace than point solutions, and they put a premium on one quality above all: reliability.

Nine years without an incident

According to the company, Cregis now serves more than 4,000 enterprise clients across more than 50 countries and regions, and has secured more than US$300 billion in transactions. Over nine consecutive years of operation, it reports no security incidents, a significant record in an industry where breaches have repeatedly made headlines.

The company has around 120 employees, working from its Hong Kong global operations hub and regional offices including Dubai, Singapore, Kuala Lumpur and São Paulo. Named client work includes enterprise digital asset payments for Laaffic and global digital asset payment infrastructure for the trading group ATFX.

Compliance built in

Cregis is building for an industry facing tighter regulation of cross-border payments and digital asset custody, and Yan has made risk management and compliance part of the product rather than an afterthought. The same standard of governance applies whether the client is a licensed institution or a traditional payments company.

In August 2026, its subsidiary Cregis Custody FZE received in-principle approval from Dubai's Virtual Assets Regulatory Authority (VARA) as part of its application for a Virtual Asset Service Provider licence. The in-principle approval is a step towards full authorisation rather than a licence in itself, but it marks the company's move into one of the most closely watched regulatory regimes for digital assets. In 2025, Cregis also launched Trust Vault, extending its custody capabilities for institutional clients, including for stablecoins.

Expanding with the market

Having grown across Asia-Pacific and the Middle East, Cregis has recently expanded into Africa and accelerated its push into Europe. The direction tracks a broader, multi-year shift: stablecoin settlement, digital custody and compliant on-ramps for regulated and traditional businesses alike.

Under Yan's leadership, Cregis's case rests on scale, a long security record and a clear view that, as digital assets move into mainstream finance, the infrastructure underneath them has to be built to institutional standards.

Cregis and its founder and CEO, Shawn Yan, are nominees in the Finance & Insurance category of the TPC Awards 2026. Figures are as provided by the company.