Author: Zen, PANews
Ruben López, a stockbroker from Buenos Aires, spends a few minutes every morning completing a special “daily operation”: he exchanges Argentine pesos at the official rate for US dollars, then converts the USD into USDC, a stablecoin pegged 1:1 to USD, on a trading platform. He then uses parallel market exchange rates to convert the stablecoin back into pesos.
As Argentina approaches midterm elections, President Javier Milei tightens foreign exchange controls to support the peso, yet Ruben spends no more than 10 minutes daily to earn a steady arbitrage profit of about 4%.
Meanwhile, a Mexican immigrant living in the U.S. opens WhatsApp, sends a few messages with USDC, and family members in Guanajuato receive pesos-settled payments on their phones within two minutes.
In recent years, Latin America—long regarded as a high-volatility, high-risk, and uncertain region—is increasingly viewed by U.S. payment giants, venture capital funds, and stablecoin startups as a key battleground for the next wave of financial infrastructure reconstruction.
In February 2026, Visa announced it would acquire Argentina’s Prisma and Newpay from Advent International to strengthen its digital payments and infrastructure capabilities in Argentina. In March, Latin American-focused stablecoin financial app ARQ disclosed a $70 million funding round, with Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund participating. ARQ is building infrastructure connecting traditional banking networks with stablecoin-based payment systems, enabling users to hold foreign currencies and conduct transactions.
Looking at these cases together, it’s clear that U.S. capital is not just interested in a single high-growth company but in occupying critical nodes in Latin America’s financial system reconstruction: who controls payment gateways, clearing networks, account relationships, and dollarization tools will have a strategic advantage in the next phase of competition.
Financial Friction Points and Latin America’s High Growth Potential
The reason Latin America has become a focal market for fintech and stablecoin companies is that its financial frictions are not abstract concepts but tangible issues repeatedly confirmed by macro indicators, payment scenarios, and on-chain activity. Financial needs here are layered and complex.
In economies like Brazil and Mexico, where inflation is relatively controlled, users’ pain points are less about currency devaluation and more about high payment costs, slow cross-border transfers, and inefficient account services. A World Bank report shows that in Q1 2025, the average cost to send $200 globally remains at 6.49%, with digital channels costing around 5%. Typical remittance costs between the U.S. and Mexico are 5-7%. For these markets, the value of fintech lies primarily in making payments, clearing, and cross-border remittances cheaper, faster, and smoother.
Conversely, in high-inflation economies like Argentina, the issue isn’t just payment efficiency but how to preserve the value of funds. For users in high-inflation markets, fintech and stablecoins primarily address store-of-value concerns—making it easier to hold relatively stable assets and conduct low-friction cross-border USD settlements.
Beyond inflation and remittance costs, Latin American financial markets also feature a significant characteristic: users have been extensively educated about digital payments, but the incomplete system still doesn’t fully solve cross-border, store-of-value, and dollarization issues.
According to the World Bank’s Global Findex and related data, digital payment adoption in many Latin American countries is already high. For example, in Brazil, 70% of adults used digital payments in 2024; in Argentina, the figure is about 72%. This indicates that many core markets in Latin America no longer need basic user education but are now competing 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. According to data from the European Payments Council, as of March 2024, Pix has about 153 million individual users and 15 million business users; in 2023, it processed approximately 42 billion transactions totaling around 17.2 trillion reais.
However, while local digital payment networks can operate, they don’t meet all financial needs. For local users, transfers are increasingly smooth, but when it comes to cross-border settlements, USD storage, hedging local currency devaluation, or low-cost global payments, existing friction remains significant.
This is where stablecoins begin to shift from being crypto assets to practical financial tools. A compelling example is the U.S.-Mexico remittance corridor. Mizuho Bank’s research shows that through partnerships with Bitso and Félix Pago, using stablecoins like USDT and USDC has reduced remittance costs below 1%. Currently, Bitso handles $6.5 billion in U.S.-Mexico stablecoin flows, accounting for about 10% of the $63 billion annual remittance market between the two countries.
On-chain data already shows that Latin American users are not just experimenting with stablecoins but are using them as real, usable dollarization tools, combining cross-border USD flow and value storage functions. The IMF estimates that Latin America and the Caribbean are among the regions with the highest stablecoin usage relative to GDP—about 7.7%.
Additionally, Chainalysis’s 2025 Latin America report indicates that from July 2022 to June 2025, total crypto transaction volume in Latin America approached $1.5 trillion. Brazil is the largest market, receiving about $318.8 billion in crypto assets; Argentina about $93.9 billion; Mexico about $71.2 billion. Regarding stablecoins, Chainalysis’s 2024 report shows that stablecoin trading volume in Argentina accounts for 61.8%, in Brazil 59.8%, both well above the global average of 44.7%.
Market Certainty and Growth Potential
In Latin America, demand is real, transactions are happening, and data confirms it. Yet, the digitization of payments, accounts, and funds management is still in early stages, with significant room for market penetration. This structural foundation means Latin America offers not only growth stories but also a coexistence of certainty and expansion potential.
On the certainty side, the data above confirms genuine demand. Growth stems from the long-term trend of payment and account digitization.
McKinsey’s research on Latin American payments states that in Spanish-speaking countries covered, debit cards have rapidly replaced cash as the preferred payment method within two years, and mobile payments are also expanding quickly. Even where cash still dominates, consumer payment preferences are clearly shifting toward non-cash tools.
On a macro level, payment digitization is not just about consumer convenience but also about transforming corporate cash flows. AIDB reports that digital payments in offline Latin American retail have increased from about 11% in 2020 to 30% in 2024. Meanwhile, over 70% of Latin American and Caribbean companies have adopted digital procurement.
This indicates digitization is penetrating not only personal transfers and payments but also corporate receivables, payables, reconciliation, and procurement management. For fintech companies, this expands the serviceable market. For example, Payoneer recently enhanced its local collection capabilities in Mexico, helping global sellers receive payments directly in pesos from local e-commerce platforms, reducing FX costs; Jeeves launched stablecoin-supported corporate cards for Latin American businesses, aiming to cut cross-border settlement times from days to minutes.
The emergence of stablecoins further reinforces this combination of certainty and growth. For Latin America, stablecoins are less about investment and more about solving USD demand and cross-border settlement issues through technological means.
Long-standing high remittance volumes and rigid cross-border payment costs make the integration of stablecoins with local payment systems resemble filling structural gaps in the real financial system rather than offering short-term speculative tools.
Some stablecoin payment services have already launched in Argentina. For example, Takenos, a fintech backed by Variant Fund and Lattice Capital, announced that by March this year, its Solana-based stablecoin solution had processed over $500 million in cross-border payments, serving 500,000 users across 20 Latin American countries, mainly for payroll and business transactions.
Why Latin America Has Become a New U.S. Capital Bet
Compared to the highly mature, big-player-dense, and well-educated U.S. market, many fintech and crypto segments in Latin America are still in the early stages of infrastructure formation, with room for growth and market reshaping. For venture capital, this often means better entry points.
In recent years, Latin American funding has continued to grow, with capital flowing more into mature, market-adapted, and more stable models. Local funding remains more early-stage, while foreign capital—mainly from the U.S.—tends to enter when companies are more mature, with validated models and clear scalability, amplifying after initial proof of concept.
In contrast, the U.S. market’s user education is complete, infrastructure is mature, and the division of roles among leading platforms and traditional financial institutions is more entrenched. New entrants often only target narrow niches, face high customer acquisition costs, or try to steal market share from giants. Latin America’s financial services landscape is still being reconstructed, with some segments already dominated by leaders but overall penetration, product depth, and regional expansion still ongoing.
Many U.S. fintech and crypto firms face a more mature and crowded existing financial system. Their competition is not just about users but also about payment gateways, account relationships, clearing paths, and regulatory influence.
The repeated delays of the 2026 U.S. crypto market structure legislation illustrate this. Resistance comes from internal congressional disagreements over stablecoin profits, token classification, and regulatory authority, as well as from traditional banks wary of stablecoins, trust licenses, and deposit substitutes.
Meanwhile, Latin American companies are helping the market leap from inefficient old systems to new ones. User migration is more compelling, and growth potential is driven by new penetration and structural upgrades. These are fundamentally different in terms of capital valuation: the former resembles competing for existing market share, while the latter aims at expanding the market.
However, profit always involves risk. What truly attracts U.S. financial institutions to Latin America is not low risk but high-value density. Yet, high-value density often entails more complex regulation, foreign exchange controls, and macroeconomic challenges.
For U.S. financial institutions, the opportunity isn’t simply copying domestic products but building infrastructure capable of handling payments, clearing, dollarization, and compliance in a high-friction market. But this path is fraught with difficulties. As Sebastián Serrano, CEO of Ripio, states, “Financial services are highly localized.” Even giants like Coinbase have paused services in Argentina due to internal considerations.
Therefore, Latin America is not a game of easy arbitrage but a marathon demanding execution, risk management, licensing understanding, and local operational resilience.
In this race, we see tangible realities: from street vendors in Rio accepting Pix QR codes, to families in Mexico City receiving USDC remittances via WhatsApp from Chicago, to freelancers in Buenos Aires earning USDT for remote work.
Who can transform these real financial pain points into sustainable, replicable, and cross-regional services will be the ultimate winner.
