Author: Zen, PANews
Original Title: US Capital Bets Heavily on Latin America: Gambling Not on Growth, but on the "Key Nodes" of the Financial System
Ruben López, a stockbroker from Buenos Aires, spends a few minutes every morning on a special "daily operation": He exchanges his Argentine pesos for US dollars at the official exchange rate, then immediately converts the dollars into the US dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC on a trading platform, and finally exchanges the stablecoin back to pesos using the parallel market exchange rate.
Coinciding with the approach of Argentina's mid-term elections, Argentine President Javier Milei tightened foreign exchange controls to support the peso exchange rate. Yet, Ruben spends no more than 10 minutes each day to steadily earn an arbitrage profit of about 4%.
Meanwhile, a Mexican immigrant living in the US opens WhatsApp, sends a few messages, attaches the stablecoin USDC, and their family in Guanajuato can receive the funds settled in Mexican pesos on their phones within two minutes.
Over the past few years, Latin America, long perceived as a region of high volatility, high risk, and high uncertainty, is increasingly being seen by US payment giants, venture capital funds, and stablecoin startups as a crucial battleground for the next round of financial infrastructure restructuring.
In February 2026, Visa announced its acquisition of the Argentine payment platforms Prisma and Newpay from Advent International to strengthen its digital payment and infrastructure capabilities in Argentina. In March, ARQ, a Latin American financial application focused on stablecoins, disclosed the completion of a $70 million funding round with participation from Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund, among others. ARQ has built infrastructure connecting traditional banking networks with stablecoin-based payment systems, enabling users to hold and transact in foreign currencies.
Looking at these cases together, it's clear that US capital is focused not just on individual high-growth companies, but on preemptively occupying the key nodes in the restructuring of Latin America's financial system: whoever controls the payment gateways, clearing networks, account relationships, and dollarized store-of-value tools will have a better chance of taking the initiative in the next phase of competition.
Financial Friction Pain Points Underpin Latin America's High-Growth Potential
The fundamental reason Latin America has become a key market for fintech and stablecoin companies is that financial friction here is not an abstract concept, but a collection of real-world problems corroborated by macroeconomic indicators, payment scenarios, and on-chain activity. The financial needs here are not singular but exhibit a clear hierarchical structure.
In economies with relatively controlled inflation, such as Brazil and Mexico, the most direct pain point for users is often not currency devaluation, but high payment costs, slow cross-border transfers, and inefficient account services. A World Bank report shows that in Q1 2025, the average global cost of sending $200 in remittances remained high at 6.49%, with the average cost for digital channels also around 5%. In a typical US-Mexico remittance scenario, traditional channel fees are as high as 5%-7%. For these markets, the value of fintech first manifests in making payments, clearing, and cross-border remittances cheaper, faster, and smoother.
On the other hand, in high-inflation economies like Argentina, the issue is not just payment efficiency, but how to preserve the value of capital itself. For users in high-inflation markets, fintech and stablecoins primarily solve not an experience optimization problem, but a value storage problem. That is, how to more conveniently hold relatively stable assets and conduct cross-border dollar settlements with lower friction.
Beyond inflation divergence and cross-border remittance costs, another notable feature of Latin American financial markets is that users have been extensively educated in recent years to embrace digital payment systems, but this still-developing system has not fully resolved cross-border, value preservation, and "dollarization" issues.
World Bank Global Findex and related public materials indicate that digital payment penetration rates are already relatively high in many Latin American countries. Taking Brazil as an example, World Bank documents show that 70% of adults made digital payments in 2024; Argentina's relevant ratio under the previous Findex口径 had also reached about 72%. This indicates that many core markets in Latin America no longer need to educate users from scratch but have entered a stage of competition focused on efficiency, cost, and scenario depth.
Take Brazil's Pix as an example; it has evolved from a transfer tool into a de facto social-level payment infrastructure. Data compiled by the European Payments Council states that as of March 2024, Pix had approximately 153 million individual users and 15 million business users; in 2023, it processed about 42 billion transactions worth approximately 17.2 trillion reais.
However, although local digital payment networks can function, they do not satisfy all user financial needs. For users in this market, local transfers can become increasingly smooth, but friction remains significant in the original system when it involves cross-border settlements, dollar storage, hedging against local currency depreciation, or low-cost global payments and collections.
It is precisely here that stablecoins are transitioning from crypto assets into practical financial tools. A highly persuasive case is the US-Mexico remittance corridor. Research from Mizuho Bank shows that through platforms like Bitso交易所 and Félix Pago, the cost of remittances using stablecoins like USDT and USDC has dropped to below 1%. Currently, stablecoin flows processed by Bitso for US-Mexico remittances have reached $6.5 billion, capturing 10% of the $63 billion annual remittance market between the US and Mexico.
This on-chain data already indicates that Latin American users are not experimenting sporadically with stablecoins but are using them as viable dollarization tools, combining cross-border dollar liquidity and value storage functions. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) estimates that, as a percentage of GDP, "Latin America and the Caribbean" is one of the regions with the most significant stablecoin usage globally, at approximately 7.7%.
Furthermore, the Chainalysis 2025 Latin America report shows that from July 2022 to June 2025, cumulative crypto transaction volume in Latin America approached $1.5 trillion. Brazil is the largest market in the region, receiving approximately $318.8 billion in crypto assets, Argentina about $93.9 billion, and Mexico about $71.2 billion. Regarding the share of stablecoins, the Chainalysis 2024 report states: Argentina's stablecoin trading volume share was 61.8%, Brazil's was 59.8%, both significantly higher than the global average of 44.7%.
Certainty and Growth Potential in Financial Markets
In Latin America, demand exists, transactions are occurring, data is verifiable, but the digitization of payments, accounts, and fund management is still in an upward phase, with significant room for market penetration growth. Therefore, the market structure foundation means Latin America offers not just a growth story, but a rare combination of certainty and growth potential.
In terms of certainty, the aforementioned market-side data is sufficient to demonstrate that real demand exists. The growth potential stems from the medium to long-term trend of payment and account digitization.
McKinsey noted in its Latin American payments research that in its sample of Spanish-speaking countries, debit cards replaced cash as consumers' most preferred payment method within just two years, and mobile payments are also rapidly gaining popularity. Even though cash still holds a significant share in many markets, consumer payment habits are clearly shifting towards non-cash instruments.
From a more macro perspective, payment digitization is not just a convenience upgrade for consumers; it is also driving a restructuring of corporate fund flows. An Inter-American Development Bank report shows that the share of digital payments in offline consumer scenarios in Latin America has increased from about 11% in 2020 to 30% in 2024. Meanwhile, over 70% of enterprises in Latin America and the Caribbean have already conducted digital procurement.
This indicates that digitization is permeating not only personal transfers and payments but also extending to corporate payment collections, reconciliation, fund pooling, procurement management, and other areas. For fintech companies, this brings a larger addressable market. For example, Payoneer recently enhanced its local collection capabilities in Mexico, helping global sellers receive payments directly in Mexican pesos from local e-commerce platforms, reducing exchange costs; while Jeeves launched a stablecoin-supported corporate card for Latin American businesses, aiming to shorten cross-border settlement times from days to minutes.
The emergence of stablecoins further reinforces this combination of certainty and growth potential. For Latin America, the importance of stablecoins lies not primarily in their investment attributes, but in their role as a technological tool to address dollar demand and cross-border settlement issues.
Remittance volumes remain persistently high, and cross-border payment costs exhibit long-term rigidity. This makes the integration of stablecoins with local payment rails more akin to filling a structural gap in the real financial system rather than providing a short-term speculative tool.
Stablecoin payment services have already begun initial operations in Argentina. For instance, Takenos, an Argentine fintech company backed by Variant Fund and Lattice Capital, announced that as of March this year, its Solana blockchain-based stablecoin solution had processed over $500 million in cross-border payments, serving 500,000 users across 20 countries in Latin America, primarily for salary payments and business transactions.
Why Latin America is the New Bet for US Capital
Compared to the highly mature, giant-filled, and long-educated US market, many fintech and crypto finance sub-sectors in Latin America are still in the stage where infrastructure is forming but the landscape is not yet finalized. For VCs, this typically represents a better entry point.
In recent years, financing in Latin America has continued to grow, with capital flowing more towards mature companies that have adapted to market changes and have more robust models. Local capital still tends to favor early stages, while foreign capital, represented by US investors, prefers to enter when companies are more mature and scalable, acting as an amplifier after the model is initially validated and expansibility becomes apparent.
Compared to Latin America, user education in the US was completed early, infrastructure is long mature, and the division of labor among leading platforms and existing financial institutions is more solidified. Latecomers can either only target very niche segments, face extremely high customer acquisition costs, or must wrestle market share from existing giants. In contrast, the boundaries of financial services in Latin America are being redrawn. Even if some sub-sectors already have leaders, overall penetration, product depth, and regional expansion are still ongoing.
Many fintech and crypto companies in the US itself face a more mature, yet more crowded,存量 financial system. What they are competing for is not just users, but payment gateways, account relationships, clearing paths, and regulatory definition power.
The repeated stalling of the US crypto market structure bill in 2026 illustrates this. The resistance comes both from ongoing disagreements within Congress over stablecoin yields, token classification, and regulatory authority, and from the traditional banking system's wariness towards stablecoins, trust charters, and the deposit substitution effect.
But companies entering Latin America are helping the market leap from an inefficient old system to a new one. The rationale for user migration is stronger, and growth space comes more from new penetration and structural upgrades. These two scenarios have completely different capital pricing logics. The former is more like competing for存量, the latter more like capturing增量.
However, returns always coexist with risks. What truly attracts US financial institutions to Latin America is never low risk, but high value density. But the other side of high value density is often a more complex regulatory, foreign exchange, and macroeconomic environment.
For US financial institutions, the opportunity here lies not in simply replicating domestic products, but in whether they can truly build payment, clearing, dollarized storage, and compliance capabilities into infrastructure within a high-friction market. But this path is also fraught with thorns. As Ripio CEO Sebastián Serrano stated, "Financial services are highly localized." Thus, even a crypto giant like Coinbase paused its services in Argentina due to various internal considerations.
Therefore, Latin America is not an easy arbitrage game but更像 a marathon requiring higher endurance in execution, risk control, licensing understanding, and localized operations.
In this race, we have already seen concrete现实切面: from street vendors in Rio de Janeiro displaying QR codes for Pix收款, to families in Mexico City receiving USDC remittances from Chicago via WhatsApp, to freelancers in Buenos Aires receiving salaries for remote work in USDT.
Whoever can transform these real, existing financial pain points into sustainable, replicable, and cross-regionally expandable service capabilities will be the ultimate winner.
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