Author: Zen, PANews
Stockbroker Ruben López from Buenos Aires spends a few minutes every morning completing 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 approaching Argentine 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, Mexican immigrants living in the US open WhatsApp, send a few messages, attach the stablecoin USDC, and their families in Guanajuato can receive the funds settled in Mexican pesos on their phones within two minutes.
Over the past few years, Latin America, long regarded 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 not just focusing on a single high-growth company, but is preemptively occupying the key nodes in the restructuring of Latin America's financial system: whoever controls the payment entry points, clearing networks, account relationships, and dollarized store-of-value tools will have a better chance of gaining the initiative in the next phase of competition.
Financial Friction Pain Points Underpin Latin America's High-Growth Potential
The fundamental reason why 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 repeatedly confirmed 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 as high as 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 such markets, the value of fintech is first manifested 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 US dollar settlements with lower friction.
Besides 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 the digital payment system, but this still-imperfect system has not fully resolved cross-border, value preservation, and "dollarization" issues.
World Bank Global Findex and related public materials show that digital payment penetration rates are already at relatively high levels in many Latin American countries. Taking Brazil as an example, World Bank documents indicate that 70% of adults made digital payments in 2024; Argentina's related proportion under the previous Findex口径 had also reached about 72%. This indicates that many core markets in Latin America no longer need user education from scratch but have entered a stage of competition centered on efficiency, cost, and scenario depth.
Taking Brazil's Pix as an example, it has evolved from a transfer tool into a de facto social-level payment infrastructure. Public data compiled by the European Payments Council stated 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 with a value of 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 once it involves cross-border settlement, US dollar storage, hedging against local currency depreciation, or low-cost global payments and collections, the friction in the original system remains significant.
It is precisely here that stablecoins begin to transform 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's partnership with Félix Pago, the cost of remittances using stablecoins like USDT and USDC has dropped to below 1%. Currently, Bitso handles stablecoin flows of $6.5 billion for US-Mexico transactions, capturing 10% of the $63 billion annual US-Mexico remittance market.
This on-chain data already shows that Latin American users are not experimenting sporadically with stablecoins; they are using them as practical dollarization tools that combine cross-border US 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 most significant for stablecoin usage globally, at approximately 7.7%.
Furthermore, the Chainalysis 2025 Latin America report shows that from July 2022 to June 2025, the cumulative crypto transaction volume in Latin America approached $1.5 trillion. Among these, Brazil is the largest regional market, receiving approximately $318.8 billion in crypto assets, Argentina about $93.9 billion, and Mexico about $71.2 billion. Regarding the proportion of stablecoin trading volume, the Chainalysis 2024 report indicates: 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 has already materialized, transactions are being formed, and data can be verified, but the digitization of payments, accounts, and fund management is still in an upward phase, with significant room for improvement in market penetration. Therefore, the market structure foundation determines that 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 pointed out 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 popularizing. Even though cash still holds a considerable share in many markets, consumer payment preferences have clearly shifted towards non-cash instruments.
From a more macro perspective, payment digitization is not just a convenience upgrade on the consumer side; it is also driving the restructuring of corporate fund processes. A report from the Inter-American Development Bank shows that the share of digital payments in offline consumption scenarios in Latin America increased from about 11% in 2020 to 30% in 2024. At the same time, over 70% of enterprises in Latin America and the Caribbean have already conducted digital procurement.
This indicates that digitization has not only penetrated personal transfers and payments but has also extended to corporate payment collections, reconciliation, fund pooling, and procurement management. For fintech companies, this brings a larger addressable market. For instance, 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 strengthens 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 US dollar needs and cross-border settlement problems.
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 implementation in Argentina. For example, 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 Latin American countries, primarily for salary disbursements and corporate 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 sectors in Latin America are still in a phase where infrastructure is forming but the landscape is not yet finalized. For VCs, this usually 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, financial service boundaries in Latin America are being redefined; even if some segments already have leaders, overall penetration, product depth, and regional expansion are still ongoing.
Many fintech and crypto companies in the US face a more mature and crowded存量 financial system. What they are competing for is not just users, but payment entry points, account relationships, clearing paths, and regulatory definition power.
The repeated setbacks of the US crypto market structure bill in 2026 illustrate this point. The resistance comes both from ongoing disagreements within Congress over stablecoin yields, token classification, and regulatory jurisdiction, and from the 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. Users have stronger reasons to migrate, and the 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, reward always coexists with risk. 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 more complex regulation, foreign exchange, and macro environments.
For US financial institutions, the opportunity here does not lie 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 said, "Financial services are highly localized." Therefore, even a crypto giant like Coinbase paused its services in Argentina due to various internal considerations.
Precisely because of this, Latin America is not an easy arbitrage game, but more like an endurance race with higher requirements for execution, risk control, license understanding, and localized operations.
In this race, we have already seen concrete现实切面: from street vendors in Rio de Janeiro displaying Pix QR codes for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.
