PETALING JAYA (June 29): PeerHive (M) Tech Sdn Bhd — one of six participants in Securities Commission (SC) Malaysia’s inaugural regulatory sandbox — has shut down, said its co-founder Vincent Yeo in a LinkedIn post on Sunday (June 28).

PeerHive has notified the SC of its withdrawal from the sandbox. The company had been testing a decentralised peer-to-peer financing protocol that used smart contracts and stablecoins to allow investors to finance small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) loans.

Yeo told Wealth that PeerHive shut down because of delays in the availability of the stablecoins it was permitted to use, while the drying up of start-up funding left it unable to sustain its operations.

"Although we received our sandbox approval from the SC, the bottleneck lies in the usage of stablecoins. We can only use Digital Asset Innovation Hub (DAIH)-approved stablecoins, but from our discussions, there is still a long wait ahead before implementation," said Yeo.

"The start-up funding has dried up too. We can no longer sustain ourselves — that’s why we decided to shut down."

The SC currently lists PeerHive as an approval-in-principle participant. This means it had received preliminary approval to enter the sandbox but still needed to meet additional requirements under its testing plan before receiving final approval to deploy its platform.

DAIH is a BNM initiative through which industry players test digital-asset applications in a controlled environment.

Founded in December 2022, PeerHive was selected on Nov 26, 2025 as one of six participants in the SC’s inaugural regulatory sandbox. The SC said participants would be given about 12 months to deploy and assess their proposed solutions, with testing commencing in either January or July 2026, depending on their readiness.

Yeo said in his LinkedIn post that he would be joining financial technology company TEIZA as product lead for credit following PeerHive’s closure.