Tokenizing Latin America: Six Currencies, One Financial System | Sebastian Serrano

What if the next stablecoin boom isn't in dollars? Ripio co-founder and CEO Sebastian Serrano joins David Hoffman to unpack how Latin America is bringing six local currencies onchain, why self-custody wallet deposits are still so expensive, and how stablecoins could improve cross-border payments. --- 📣SPOTIFY PREMIUM RSS FEED | USE CODE: SPOTIFY2 https://bankless.cc/spotify-premium --- BANKLESS SPONSOR TOOLS: 🔓NEAR | TRADE CONFIDENTIALLY, GET 20% BACK https://bankless.cc/near2026 🌍 RIPIO | LOCAL CURRENCIES, ONCHAIN https://bankless.cc/ripio 🛡️VIZOR | THE WALLET ZCASH DEVS USE https://bankless.cc/vizor 🎯THE DEFI REPORT | ONCHAIN INSIGHTS https://thedefireport.io/bankless --- TIMESTAMPS 0:00 Crypto adoption in Latin America 5:38 Local currencies, FX and the carry trade 8:19 Inside Ripio: crypto infrastructure for LatAm 16:29 Fixing on-ramps with local stablecoins 28:26 Wrapped fiat: business model and cross-border payments 35:29 Distribution and which blockchains 42:14 Regulators, banks and market growth --- RESOURCES Sebastián Serrano https://x.com/sserrano44 --- Not financial or tax advice. See our investment disclosures here: https://www.bankless.com/disclosures

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00David Hoffman?

  Welcome to Bankless, where today we're talking about the tokenization of the local fiat currencies of Latin America's biggest six economies: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Mexico. My guest on today's podcast is Sebastian Serrano. He is the CEO and co-founder of Ripio, one of Latam's biggest crypto fintech companies. Ripio, for those who aren't familiar, it's like the Coinbase of Latin America. Not the perfect comparison, but close enough. It's got on-ramps, it's an exchange, it does payments, and it also powers a lot of the crypto-enabled backend for the rest of Latin American fintech institutions. Ripio is building something that makes a lot of sense to me: a central hub of foreign exchange, banking, and payment services

• 0:42David Hoffman?

  that uses tokenized fiat currencies that they've tokenized themselves to create a single financial layer for Latam. So if you're looking for a story where centralized, siloed financial ledgers are replaced with open, public, permissionless blockchains with tokenized real-world assets that are made available for banking and payments, this is that. This fits on the main arc of crypto, which is why it's pretty exciting to me. Ripio is using its position in the market to just connect hundreds of local payment systems in each respective country to connect it to blockchain-based finance on Ethereum, Cello, World Chain, and a few other EVMs as well. So a pretty bankless story, if you ask me. And with that context out of

• 1:26David Hoffman?

  the way, let's go hear from Sebastian from Ripio.

• 1:32David Hoffman?

  Bankless Nation, I'm joined by Sebastian Serrano. He is the co-founder and CEO of Ripio. Ripio is one of the largest crypto fintech companies in Latin America. It's always a good day to have an Argentine on the podcast. Sebastian, welcome to Bankless.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  Thank you. I'm a fan of the pod. It's an honor. It's like, finally, like 13 years in crypto and finally make it to Bankless.

• 1:55David Hoffman?

  It has been a long time coming. You and I met two years ago at Alif, which was the crypto pop-up city that happened in Buenos Aires. But you have been operating crypto since before I was an adult, forever. Yeah. Maybe you can just teach us something about where Latin America is with regards to crypto. So Bankless listeners will know that Argentina adopted stablecoins far ahead of the curve. Argentina has plenty of crypto developers simply because of hyperinflation and capital controls. I think most people kind of know this story, but how has it evolved since then, in 2026? How has crypto been adopted in Latin America? And what's been the story in the last two years or so?

• 2:39Speaker 01

  So crypto, especially in Argentina and across Latam, is one of the reasons that started to adopt it before. I think, well, the high inflation, weak institutions has led to people to find alternatives. I got into crypto in 2012 using it. Like, I didn't understood what Bitcoin was, and I was using it because I had a software development company. I was working with people in the US, and it was hard to pay for my developers back in Argentina. And I finding a solution was, well, what is this thing? Bitcoin. Started

• 3:21Speaker 01

  using it. I didn't even knew that it was 21 million Bitcoins. And then I started to learn it and pay it. So started to pay in Bitcoin in 2012. And initially on forums, and that led to build a company. You love Patagonia. Most of the roads in Patagonia are made of Ripio. It's kind of like, I grew up in Patagonia. The metaphor of the company is to build roads to access to crypto. And that has evolved from there. And there is

• 4:00Speaker 01

  a lot of adoption, but also the level of sophistication is deeper, especially in Argentina, Venezuela. People understand deeper the technology, and we see the most complex use cases around it with a lot of integration into the economy, which I think in other countries, you don't see that that profound. I have a friend, for example, that went to a dealership to buy a car. They wanted the payment in cash. This guy say, well, I don't

• 4:41Speaker 01

  have cash. Say, well, will you take USDT? And the dealership say, yes, obviously. And he had a trash wallet and accepted USDT to reserve this car that he was buying. So it's deeper, and the use cases are deeper. One of the things that is, I think, is a little bit different about other countries is like, you see a lot of savings in stablecoins. And there is less of a usage of speculation, because people is actually trying to protect themselves. So crypto around the world is more about speculation and about seeking

• 5:25Speaker 01

  opportunity. In countries like Argentina, people is actually trying to find safe haven. And crypto has been that for a lot of people.

• 5:38David Hoffman?

  Now, there is all these different currencies, all these different fiat currencies across Latin America. Does just the user behavior of foreign exchange, just having to trade currencies, is that more common in Latin America than maybe inside of the United States, simply because that's what the economy demands down there?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  It is more common in several countries, not on all of them. So every country in Latin America has different, it has their own unique economies and needs. For example, in Argentina, Venezuela, Bolivia, there is a lot of needs for effects and protecting your savings. So people will know at every moment how much is the exchange rate between pesos and dollars, and they will know it by memory. Not so much in Brazil. In Brazil, the real has been strong for many years, and the economy has been...

• 6:44David Hoffman?

  Argentines think and denominate in the dollar, whereas Brazilians denominate in the real.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  And many Brazilians don't know the exchange rate. It has been so stable, they will just say five, $1.5 real. And it has been going around that for a long time. Actually, one of the bonds in Brazil pay really well. They pay between 13% to 15%. So there is a large carry trade that can be done with Brazilian reals, which pays you 13%, 15% annual. And the exchange rate has been very stable for the last decade. So a lot of people do carry trade with reals. We recently started to issuing local currencies for all Latin American

• 7:36Speaker 01

  countries. We did Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, and Peru. And we are seeing a lot of Argentinians buying WBL, our Brazilian local stablecoin, to do carry trade from Argentina. And that's one, because it's something that is understood across Latam, that the real is strong. And this is, yeah, but it's very common to, in almost every country, to know the exchange rate and use your currency during the month. And at the end of the month, whatever is left, you tend to buy dollars to save that. It's a very common behavior.

• 8:19David Hoffman?

  Something you just said is that you guys tokenized a bunch of local currencies in Latin America: the Argentine peso, Brazilian real, six different local fiat currencies. That's not a small deal. But tokenizing a bunch of nation-state fiat currencies, it can unlock quite the opportunity. I want to get our way there in this conversation. I think our North American and European listeners probably need a little bit of a crash course on Ripio. It's one of the largest fintechs in Latin America, especially as regards to crypto. But I bet you, anyone outside of Latin America probably needs a little bit of an introduction. Talk to me about Ripio, and what you guys do, and what your position is in the market down in Latin America.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  We started in 2013, initially as the first Bitcoin wallet in Argentina. We grew that across Latin America. We operated in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Uruguay. We have a money transmission license in the US. Everything in crypto, we started very retail, so wallet exchange. And about 2020, 21, we thought, well, everybody is going to integrate crypto, and it's going to be everywhere. And we thought like, our role was better to be a B2B partner, a crypto-as-a-service provider, to enable banks, fintechs,

• 9:46Speaker 01

  e-commerce to integrate crypto.

• 9:49Speaker 01

  That has grown a lot. B2B has been the focus for the last five years.

• 9:54David Hoffman?

  Is this, I want to pause you right here. Is this parallel to Coinbase's arc? So Coinbase started as a wallet and an exchange. And now they are trying to be a white listing service in the backend of like North American brokerages. So Charles Schwab or the boomer brokerages that are too slow to build out their own exchange. They just plug into Coinbase. Is it fair to say that like the first part of Ripio's life is just like speed running the Coinbase playbook?

• 10:17Speaker 01

  Something like that, yeah. And that has grown a lot. We are the crypto as a service provider of MercadoLibre. MercadoLibre is like the Amazon of Latin America. The

• 10:28David Hoffman?

  Amazon or Stripe?

• 10:30Speaker 01

  It's more like Amazon. So it's Amazon and Stripe together. So the e-commerce is extremely large. They're the largest e-commerce in the region. And they also have a fintech called MercadoPago, is the largest fintech. In that fintech, we are the back of the crypto offering. So we do the buy, hold, sell of most of their tokens. We also help them launch their own token for their loyalty program. It's very large. We have like 35 million users in B2B to C. Because of the size of MercadoLibre and because their loyalty program runs in crypto,

• 11:15Speaker 01

  we do like 100, 200 transactions per second on the platform. Almost every stockbroker in Argentina that offers crypto does it with an infrastructure. So it's like the B2B offering is quite large. We have local entities, PSP licenses, pass licenses across the region, banking relationships across all these countries. And that is what allows us, like, I feel like we have been working a decade into building all this plumbing to be able to offer, like, to to tokenize all of these stablecoins, which I think is a key piece of infrastructure for the next phase of crypto.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  And that's not being a simple ride.

• 12:04David Hoffman?

  There was a, during the like stablecoin boom about a year ago, right? When Circle was going public, there was just like a big VC like stablecoin push. When everyone on the retail side on crypto Twitter was very bearish on crypto. But then we realized that all of Wall Street is very bullish on stablecoins. And everyone was learning about how to invest in the stablecoin stack. And one thing that was painfully obvious was that there were two classes of companies out there. There were a lot of companies out there who were just trying to like aggregate a bunch of banking APIs. So they would, you know, open up accounts with a bunch of banks and they would aggregate all the banking APIs. And they would try to like raise a VC round based off of the value of having like this aggregation of APIs.

• 12:49David Hoffman?

  It very became very quickly, much more obvious that the actual value were in these crypto fintech startups that actually had the licenses and went down into the nation state apparatus of that respective economy, that respective nation, and got the regulatory licenses to get approval to do things, do the hard things, like a true banking and, you know, true exchange. So you just said that you've been through all of these companies and you have all of the licenses and the regulatory requirements. What does that get you? What purchase does that get you in Latin America in these days? Why does having all of these licenses important? What does that enable for you?

• 13:29Speaker 01

  One of the things is being able to connect to the real time payment networks. So Latam actually has some of the best fintechs in the region and in the world. And the banking infrastructure is actually quite good. The currencies are weak because of all the abuse that governments have done to the currencies. But you have PEX in Brazil, CIVU in Argentina, BREVE, CLAVE. These are all real time payment networks that work a lot better than what you have in the US or in many other countries. They are very inexpensive.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  They are instantaneous. They are integrated both to the banking transfers and also the payment, a payment infrastructure. So you can scan your code and make a payment. And this has like grow, like PEX payments are larger than than card payments in Brazil. And then because of like how well, how much more adapted this got. So being able to have all this local infrastructure, being pass PSP and have connections to all these banking rails allow us not only to issue the stablecoins, but also connect them to the local infrastructure.

• 14:54Speaker 01

  And to be honest, like, so there is a lot, so there is a lot of stablecoin issuance and like a ton of people going after this opportunity. But almost everybody is going after dollar denominated stablecoins. And we're not issuing a dollar denominated stablecoin. We're issuing local stablecoins. And we got here with like, if you ask me like three years ago, I will have say, well, but there's not going to be demand for local currencies, like local, local stablecoins. People don't buy local stablecoins. Like people, the dollars, the dollar has demand because people saving dollars. And they just want to buy the asset to protect themselves.

• 15:38Speaker 01

  And why they are going to buy a local, a local stablecoin? And the reality is not, they're not going to buy it. There is no intrinsic demand for it, but people use it. They use it to pay their bills in local currency. Almost every contract is denominated in local currency. And we started to see the need for this from an integration. So for the last five years, we have been working with banks, fintechs, e-commerce. And two years ago, we say, well, we should start working with crypto companies. We should like, we should use all this infrastructure to help non custodial wallets,

• 16:20Speaker 01

  crypto protocols to use our infrastructure, our ramps to keep service in, across, and grow across Latin America. We started to work with one non custodial wallet. We built ramps for them so that they could launch in Argentina. And they do it. And immediately after we see, well, this is awful. Like the conversion rates are bad, the retention is horrendous. And maybe to us it was like that because we know how it should look. Like we saw the other side, like how a fintech or a new bank will convert. We look at this non custodial wallet and it's horrendous. And then we started to dig into what is happening?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  What is happening to this non custodial wallet from a very large company? This team, like what is going on? And then we realized that what was happening is that if you open a non custodial wallet, the call to action is very different from what a fintech will do. If you open Nubank, Revolut, MercadoPago, the first call to action is deposit. The button is even in a different color. You open Metamask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet, WorldApp, whatever. Every non custodial wallet today, the call to action is buy.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  You click buy, there is a bunch of on-ramps that appear. You click that, you had to go into an onboarding that takes five, 10 minutes. You do that, let's say you're a Brazilian. At the end of that five, 10 minutes of onboarding, you finally see a PEX ID. You send a thousand rails and then you end up buying ETH or USDC or USDT. You now have 950 in it. So your first experience using crypto is losing money.

• 18:14David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I think that's a universal experience for crypto people, especially in self custodial wallets. There's a problem that we still really frequently have not solved. If I want to fund a non custodial wallet, the KYC process is completely borked, like a one in 10 chance that I get it correct. And then if I do get it correct, to your point, I'm paying an astronomical amount of fees just to have that money served to me immediately.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So you pay FX and a spread. You want to go back, you pay again. So you now end up with 900. So how do we fix that? And we started to think, well, we need to fix this. And how do we fix this? And we thought, well, first we need to make the onboarding one to one. So the user has to pay zero fees on the onboarding. And then we need to make it a deposit on chain. Like it has to be the local representation. So the user can go and click deposit, do the onboarding, get a PEX ID. They send a thousand rails and they had to get a thousand rails on chain. And that's why we said, well, that is, and then build a business model

• 19:25Speaker 01

  around the managing the float so that we can subsidize the ramps and be a cost so that we can do it frictionless. So that way the user can be on an on part experience with a fintech. Like it's like the same experience they have on Nubank or MercadoPago or Revolut. Like deposit, get, send a thousand rails, have a thousand rails. And a thousand pesos, have a thousand pesos. And then that was the initial trigger. But then, then we thought, well, like when we started, when we launched it, immediately sees really good conversion rate. It is growing really fast. It's like AUM is growing 30% month over month.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  We also started to see all these other use cases. We like, if you look DeFi, it's all backwards. In emerging markets, people saving dollars. You go into Morpho or Abbe and you put Bitcoin or ETH as collateral and you borrow dollars. But in emerging markets, people saving dollars. They should use that as collateral.

• 20:31David Hoffman?

  They're trying to be defensive, to put your point earlier. They're being defensive with their capital rather than speculative.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  So they should put USDC or USDT as collateral and they should be borrowing local currency. But to be able to borrow local currency from a DeFi protocol, we need the representation of the local currency on chain. So that's why we also need this local stablecoins on chain so that we can flip this and be useful for people in emerging markets.

• 21:02Speaker 01

  Another use case that I think is going to be extremely... But the people that is working on local stablecoins are only looking at this, which is FX on chain. And you see a lot of people going after it. I think it's going to be, it's going to be big. It's not going to be the only use case, it's going to be one of them. Crypto is built for, like blockchain technology is built for trading. We're trading meme coins for other meme coins.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  If you... It's already better for small transactions than the traditional system. If you go to Wise and you try to send a thousand rails to Argentina, you're going to get 285,000 pesos. If you do it already on Uniswap with WBRL to WRs, you're going to get 315. So it's like 10% difference on Uniswap today. That is also because like these are two little bolater currencies. A traditional preventance company will have to send wire to the US and then wire back into destination.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  So from Argentina to Brazil, like these are two currencies that are hard to have in treasury. You will have to have stocks in each one of these countries. But these are neighbor countries and this is something that blockchain is going to be just better. And it's going, it's going to grow and it's likely one of the things that I think is going to take off first. But then anything that you want to localize is going to require local stablecoins. Let's say you want to localize, I have not seen something taking off with this. But let's say you want to localize Polymarket.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  It's growing a lot across the world. It's one of the biggest use cases today of crypto is prediction markets. If you want to build a prediction market for Boca River, which are the two largest football teams in Argentina.

• 23:12David Hoffman?

  Argentine soccer team, yeah.

• 23:14Speaker 01

  The stadium's in fire. Every time they play the super Clásico. So it's very important, but, but unique to Argentina and Argentina is scared about it. If you want to build a prediction market for that, why are you going to do it in dollars? It should be in local currency. So the vaults, the holes and the assets for that prediction market should have local currency in it. And the way to do that on chain is to have a local, local stablecoin. So we got extremely bullish about all this and like we are basically putting all our efforts right now into this product, which has the local stablecoin, RAMs that are one to one,

• 23:59Speaker 01

  on-chain liquidity, so that you can go in and out and trade it to dollar stablecoins. And building all that infrastructure, like one API for all of them. And we're extremely bullish about that.

• 24:14David Hoffman?

  Your checking account isn't public, so why should your crypto be? As AI gets more powerful, your privacy gets weaker. Connecting your identity to your financial history on-chain or off is the easiest it's ever been and will only get easier from here. Every data breach adds another piece to the puzzle and every public transaction leaves a trail back to you. And when your wealth is visible, you become a target. Money that can be seen can be stolen. Being in control of your money should include controlling who sees what you do with it. Zcash fixes this. Zcash is private digital money with privacy enforced by zero-knowledge cryptography. Zcash shielded transactions let you send and spend without publicly revealing who you're paying or how much. When it comes to privacy, there is no second best. Get started with Zcash using Vizor, the wallet Zcash devs and enthusiasts use to encrypt their money.

• 24:59David Hoffman?

  Zcash wallets are non-trivial and Vizor goes the extra mile to make sure your money and privacy are fully protected. Open source, self-custodial, fully private. Use the link in the show notes to download Vizor on mobile or desktop. Protect your future. Use Zcash. Dollar stablecoins taught Latin America how to store value on-chain. Ripio is taking that same idea and bringing it to the currencies people actually use every day. With Wrapped Fiat, Ripio is putting more than a decade of experience powering crypto infrastructure for leading companies across Latin America behind a suite of six local currency stablecoins covering Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Peru. Each is pegged one-to-one to its local currency and fully backed by reserves held in regulated financial institutions with independent attestations published for each token. But Wrapped Fiat is not just designed to sit there, it's built to move.

• 25:44David Hoffman?

  The suite is live across 10 EVM chains with liquidity and integrations already spanning platforms like Morpho, Uniswap, and Chainlink. Users can move between local payment rails like Pix and Spay and matching Wrapped Fiat one-to-one in real time with zero fees on both on-ramps and off-ramps and no FX conversion. Local rails in, on-chain in the middle. And for builders, Ripio offers APIs, webhooks, widgets, and a sandbox just from day one. Start building with Wrapped Fiat today at platform.ripio.com. I want to back up a little bit and go back to the on-ramp piece. There's that idea that the, the thing that really fueled the growth of the internet was ads. Ads as opposed to like microtransactions.

• 26:26David Hoffman?

  Like ads, watching an ad for a few seconds was the microtransaction that paid for user-generated content that created the internet as we know today. And I think you can kind of take that same analogy forward to what is the thing that paid for the growth of crypto? That was large centralized exchanges subsidizing the costs of on-ramps. Because on-ramps in crypto are a terrible business model. A lot of the startups that have been just on-ramp only have just not really gone very well. And as it turns out, the centralized exchanges, the Coinbase's, the Kraken's, I'm localizing our conversation to America, so the listeners can track along. The on-ramp is not where they make their money.

• 27:11David Hoffman?

  They make their money on exchange fees, they make their money on the floats, and they really just build the on-ramp because that's what they need to get the capital on, on-ramp, obviously. But like the fraud costs that Coinbase has to deal with.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  It's true for every fintech. That is true for, it's general, it's not just for crypto. Like if you look at the, if you look at Nubank or like any new bank, they, they subsidize a lot of the going in into the app and they make their money from another thing. Like for example, in Nubank, it is credit. So the credit card is the profit generating piece of the fintech. So this, this is not, this is not just on crypto. It is in every financial service.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  You try to make the on-ramp very frictionless and at a cost. And then you need to build some other business model where you're going to find the profits to justify making it the most frictionless possible.

• 28:26David Hoffman?

  You've coined the Argentine peso, the Brazilian real, the Colombian, Colombian local currency. I don't know what that's called. Six different like local currencies. Yeah. And like, so like the business model that Ripio holds here is like a stablecoin issuer. So it's like a money market fund in the respective countries. And you're making that bet.

• 28:51David Hoffman?

  Right, because that's because you have all of the licenses, the regulatory compliance that enables you to do this. And so like you're a, you're a money market fund in all of these, you know, six respective different countries. And you're making the bet that there is enough payment demand, exchange demand. To your point, no one really wants to buy and hold Argentine peso. That's not really a sound financial strategy. But you're making a bet that there is enough payment demand that like the net buyer or net holder of Argentine pesos or Brazilian real is like all of these people who are needing to transact or, or spend or have the velocity of money going around in the economy. And that will create a...

• 29:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. Velocity is generous. Like we have some Dune dashboards. If someone wants to go look at them, but the entire supply that we have today is like 15 million.

• 29:44Speaker 01

  Like when we launched it in November last year with less than a million, now it's growing really fast. Entire supply moves weekly. So the velocity is really, is really fast. You can look at it as the opportunity in two ways. One is like the one that was describing through use cases. So you can look at each one of these use cases, how much they can grow and where they can take us. The other way to look at this is how tokenization is progressing.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  So if we talk like a decade ago, we'll have say like tokenization, we're going to tokenize everything. And there was a startup that I know that they were tokenizing sneakers. And like we're going to tokenize everything. And, and we were thinking through the most illiquid things. But what ended up happening is that tokenization is going from the most liquid down the chain to the most illiquid. And what is the most liquid asset? The US dollar. As there's 23 trillion US dollars, 1% of that is tokenized, 1.5%.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  Treasury thinks it's going to be 10% in a decade, but it's going to progress and it's going there. Now we're seeing an explosion on tokenization of equities, treasuries, bonds, and that the last few months has been growing really fast. I think the next thing is going to be the tokenization of local currency. And it's just the progression of that tokenization from the most liquid, most used asset down into everything, and we will end up in everything. Everything will be tokenized, including local currencies or non-USD currencies. In terms of the size, like non-USD currencies is 100 trillion.

• 31:46Speaker 01

  So it's five times the US. Half of that is China.

• 31:53Speaker 01

  Latam, if you just Brazil and Mexico is 40 trillion. So this is quite substantial. And yields are much higher. So like yields of Argentinean pesos is 25% right now. Brazilian reals is 13, 15. So it's smaller money supply, but that larger yields. How much of that gets tokenized? Well, we'll try to, today is zero, is 0.002%. We're going to try to make it 1%.

• 32:28David Hoffman?

  Can you walk me through a bank-to-bank transfer across some of these countries? So like Brazil to Argentina, for example, like without using crypto or blockchain? Like, how does a payment today go from a Brazilian bank to an Argentine bank?

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Oh, so it depends. And there are different tools to do it. So something very common, there is a lot of Brazilians that sends their kids to study in Buenos Aires. Very common to send Brazilians to study medicine in Buenos Aires. The fathers sending money, they're more likely going to use Wise. They're going to do a PEX transfer to Wise and Wise is going to, next day,

• 33:21Speaker 01

  do a transfer, a local transfer through CBU to the bank account on the other side. It usually takes one day, it's likely going to take 10%.

• 33:37David Hoffman?

  10%.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  On the exchange. The other way around is actually much, much, much more evolved because of PEX on the other side. So there is a lot of companies like for, you can, you can, from MercadoPago or almost every fintech, scan a QR code in Brazil and pay that PEX in Brazil. In the back, there's likely going to be some crypto involved with a stablecoin sandwich. And that is already very, very developed and very integrated into the Argentinean apps. Maybe because the product teams in Argentina are more crypto savvy and they find ways to connect, to connect these things.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  So it varies, but Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico have very good payment networks. And they, and they, and they good fintechs working in these spaces. Other countries are lagging behind, like Uruguay, Chile, Peru. They don't have real-time payment networks, but they are all copying Brazil. The first one to launch it was Brazil with PEX. And everybody is launching their own version of PEX across the region. And that, and that, together with the understanding of crypto, is all getting intertwined and connected.

• 35:06Speaker 01

  The use of what is called the stablecoin sandwich is very common. So more and more fintechs are using stablecoins in the back with the users not knowing it. And I think that is very likely the future. Crypto is going to power a lot of experiences and people likely are not going to, not going to know that they're using it.

• 35:29David Hoffman?

  So with all of these currencies that you've tokenized, the six currencies, is that a B to B to C product? Is that also a consumer product as well? Who, who is that really for? And how is that really kind of changing the topology of like bank payments across countries?

• 35:49Speaker 01

  So, so at the, at the, we call it a platform. So first thing is having a mint account. So being able to mint and redeem these stablecoins locally. We have two go-to-market strategies. One is the crypto as a service, which is this offering that we already have with many banks and fintechs. So integrating it there, it's already available. Yol, which is the largest stockbroker in Argentina, already has WRS integrated. We're making many other integrations like this. So that crypto as a service is kind of like a, a way to build distribution of crypto on our assets. Then we then have like the ramps product.

• 36:33Speaker 01

  This is like the offering of one-to-one ramps so that you can build a very frictionless onboarding into, into your app. We power WordUp, Coinbase Wallet.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  We just started to work with MiniPay. There are many, there is a wallet that's very popular in Brazil called Picnic that is starting to use it. So in the last quarter, like 10 fintechs and non-custodial wallets started to integrate all this, this, this product.

• 37:11Speaker 01

  Together with that, there is a, we have a very strong market team that provides on-chain liquidity. With that, we are joining the stable effects of Circle. So that is a, is a, is a big component of, of, of making this, making this useful. And a lot of integrations to local payment networks. So that you can scan a QR code and make a, pay a PEX or a CBU in Argentina. So that you can, QR code payments are very popular across the region, similar to China. And they, so have all that connection. So it's not just the, the local stablecoin, but also the connection to all the local infrastructure.

• 37:56Speaker 01

  So that you can basically have one API and cover a region. So, and have not seen it anywhere else. We're going, only going to do Latam, but I think this is something that we need to do across the world.

• 38:13David Hoffman?

  The image that is coming together in my mind is like, we have this central hub of liquidity with all the different tokenized fiat currencies. You call it, you call it wrapped fiat. And that's like the center clearinghouse, if you will, for all of these different trades being made across currencies, all the Forex, Forex exchanges being made across, across the border, but then also payments as well. And that's, that's at the hub. And what's at the margins is the respective local countries' payment systems, which again, you guys have access to because of the licenses and the work that you've already done, being kind of like the crypto backend. And so you have the localization payment hubs at the margins and then the center wrapped fiat currencies, which is your, your core product.

• 38:59David Hoffman?

  I suppose the, the bankless vision here would be that like, first, you integrate all of the payments, the localized payment currencies. But then there's a circular economy that develops as more and more people kind of stay towards the center and don't need to go out towards the margins. Is that kind of the, the grand vision here?

• 39:17Speaker 01

  I hope so, I hope so. And then that way we just, people that doesn't have to redeem anymore and transfer between each other. And you can have a very good financial experience without having to need a bank. So it's truly bankless.

• 39:38David Hoffman?

  What blockchain is this hosted on?

• 39:40Speaker 01

  We, we, so, so right now we're only supporting EVMs. We're on 10 chains. Ethereum Mini is the largest on AOM.

• 39:51Speaker 01

  There is a lot of activity on Base, on Cello and Watchdog.

• 39:55David Hoffman?

  Yeah, I was wondering if Cello would be up there because I know Cello has, it just punches way above their weight class in terms of just like developing country stablecoin payments.

• 40:04Speaker 01

  So we, I think they are the ones that have the. Best strategy around local stablecoins and FX. They're obsessed with that. And I think they punch way above their weight, as you mentioned. BASE is also very interested in bringing all local currencies on chain. World Chain has a lot of users in LatAm and they integrated deeply all ramps. They have like 6 million active users across the region. So there is a lot of activity and most active addresses are on World Chain

• 40:50Speaker 01

  for our stablecoin suite and they were the first ones to integrate. And then we are on Polygon, on ARC. I think stable FX is also going to be very interesting. Launching on Temple, NOSI. So we're gonna try to be everywhere. Liquidity is likely going to gravitate towards these first four, I think.

• 41:18David Hoffman?

  But you're leaning into your competency as like a crypto service provider, more of a backend service provider, rather than going direct to consumer. Right?

• 41:27Speaker 01

  It's more a B2B to C, B2B to B approach than a direct retail.

• 41:34David Hoffman?

  Right.

• 41:34Speaker 01

  Hopefully, we're everywhere.

• 41:35David Hoffman?

  You're okay with deploying across all the chains. May the best chain win. That's not your fight. That's BASE's fight. That's ARC's fight. That's Cello's fight. You know, the Ethereum layer one. Let liquidity settle.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  We have not deployed outside of Ethereum, AVM chains. So no Solana or other chains right now. We know a lot of each. Like we're playing on a strength and we understand Ethereum virtual machine better than any other platform and our team does it. So so far, only AVM.

• 42:14David Hoffman?

  Who are you going to offend if this product is successful? I would imagine that the Argentine government has some loose notion of capital controls. Would this offend them? Are there banks in Latin America that this is disruptive towards? Who are you disrupting the most here?

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Local regulators and local central banks have better alignment with local stablecoins because you're going to basically be buying debt from governments. So it has a better alignment. As it grows, banks likely know and like it on their... Banks already have a lot of pressure on losing the relationship with their clients. And they, DeFi is gonna pay.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  I think DeFi is going to be so much more competitive than local banks. They don't pay, they pay nothing for deposits. So that is going to put pressure. Today is 0.01%, so it's not even in the radar of anyone. I don't think, so we have not heard of anyone else with the same strategy that we're doing today. So maybe we're very early or very wrong. But we're betting all on it.

• 43:55David Hoffman?

  Talk to me about, when did this product come out? And what are the numbers that you've seen so far?

• 44:01Speaker 01

  So we launched it in November last year. So it's almost a year. And the AUM initially was 800K. Now it's at 15 million. It's growing 30% very stable, month over month. We have like 46,000 active addresses right now, monthly. The velocity is really high, like it is between 10, 15 million or move every week. So there is a lot of transfers between users.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  A third of the supply is going into Morpho, into Bolts for these local currencies. The volumes on Uniswap, it wasn't something that we really thought that is going to start early on, but we see them growing. Like the last month, it doubled the amount of swaps that we see on Uniswap.

• 45:11David Hoffman?

  And who's providing liquidity there? Are you guys providing liquidity? You're kind of just doing that as a capital investment?

• 45:19Speaker 01

  So today, we are the ones providing liquidity on chain. And we are the LPs in all the networks and these pools. But eventually, you're gonna start having competition. It's like very likely, so people will...

• 45:40David Hoffman?

  Is it very profitable to LP between an emerging market stablecoin and the US dollar? Or I would imagine, because like as that emerging market stablecoin loses versus the dollar, the company ends up holding the stablecoin.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you're going to ask a lot more yield to be having that position. The volumes are going to be, gonna need to be higher to support the positions. But I think it's still, it's gonna, it's the same that happens with the traditional FX. And this is a lot more efficient. So you're gonna, you're gonna start seeing a lot of companies migrating to this

• 46:40Speaker 01

  because you're gonna require less capital, it's gonna be faster. And that should justify it. So the market is gonna find a price. But yes, people is gonna want a lot more than 34%.

• 46:55David Hoffman?

  What's the actual kind of business that's swapping between like the Brazilian real and the US dollar on Uniswap? And I'm assuming it's Uniswap V3, so there's concentrated positions. Is it a lot of retail doing 10, 100, $1,000 swaps? Or businesses putting in larger amounts?

• 47:13Speaker 01

  These are smaller swaps. If we had time, we'll see some dashboards. But the, so today, these are smaller transactions under $200. So these are small transactions. The model that I think is, so AMMs are not that well suited for FX. So likely, we're gonna see them grow because AMMs are very good at finding price. And FX markets have references. So price discovery is not really the issue.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  There is all other issues about like exposure and settlement times. There is a lot of other set of issues on FX. Price discovery is not really one of them. So the development of RFQ systems on blockchains are going to be good to grow the size of transactions. AMMs are likely going to capture the small transactions, like these sizes, $200, $1,000. That ones, AMMs are going to be good. But large transactions are going to require order books,

• 48:41Speaker 01

  like Hyperliquid or like the kind. And RFQ systems like Stable FX or on Cello, Textile Protocol. So we're gonna need this kind of like works. We're experimenting internally with hooks on Uniswap before so that we can have...

• 49:06Speaker 01

  A different type of pool that will have a reference that we will push to that. And there is people experimenting around this. So in order to grow on transaction sizes, we're gonna need some iterations on how the access works, but it's gonna come.

• 49:29David Hoffman?

  Sebastian, I think this is pretty cool. I don't think I've seen, as you've said, I don't think I've seen this model played out before. The like spider web of liquidity with all the disabled coins on chain connected to the localized payment rails. All of this makes sense to me. I hope the best for you guys. If listeners are peaked and they want to learn more, where should they go?

• 49:49Speaker 01

  They can go repy.com and they will find all the documentation. It's very well documented for L L M's to integrate it really fast. On platform dot repy, you can get API keys on sandbox directly and cover all of them. And like we already reached like with this set, it's like 95% of the population of Latin America. And then, yeah, from there, I'll find us on Twitter. Always be there, terminally online.

• 50:23David Hoffman?

  Terminally online, yeah. I've been trading crypto for almost a decade and I've used so many different wallets, exchanges, aggregators or front ends. And I'm basically always looking for the same thing, just one interface with a deep liquidity across a bunch of chains and assets where I can access markets like perps, earn yield, trade confidentially, and still control all of my funds. And I've never really found it and I'm just always switching wallets, juggling gas fees or getting eaten by slippage. But near.com feels fundamentally different to me. I can do anything I want from any chain and keep all of my activity confidential. Crypto, tokenized assets, perps, payments, I can even earn yield confidentially. One account over 30 chains confidential by default. It's the way that crypto ought to work and it's powered by near, which has moved over

• 51:06David Hoffman?

  $30 billion cross-chain, uses post-quantum signatures and has run over five years on mainnet with zero downtime. Near.com is the best way to be on-chain and be in control. Get 20% of your trading fees back on near.com using the bankless link in the show notes, not investment advice.

• 51:22Ryan Sean Adams?

  Some exciting news. We are launching a new podcast to help people figure out the crypto cycle, how to navigate it. The best crypto cycle investor I know, his name is Michael Nato, he runs the DeFi Report. This is the guy that sent me a sell alert before the 1010 price drop happened. His cycle analysis has been absolutely on point. I've been following him for years and this year we started recording weekly podcast episodes. Each one, we get into his portfolio, what he's holding, the market structure, entry targets, fair market value of Bitcoin and Ether and where we are in the cycle. There's new episodes that are released every Wednesday. They're 30 minutes, they're short, they're punchy. I think this crypto cycle is harder to navigate than most, so let's do it together. Go subscribe to this podcast, search the DeFi Report, wherever you get your podcasts,

• 52:04Ryan Sean Adams?

  YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or find a link in the show notes, there's a new episode waiting for you now.

• 52:09David Hoffman?

  It's not often that you see a such a clear product story that represents exactly what crypto is trying to do. Like we talk about how finance is just this siloed, patchwork mess of closed bank layers talking to other closed bank layers. And to me, this feels like perfectly inversely the opposite, where this is a large on-chain centerpiece, clearinghouse of global fiat currencies that spider web down, like I said, all the way to local payment rails. And so it's nice to see the bankless vision still making its way forward, even when self custody and other parts about holding your own assets has kind of felt not the strongest as it had in recent years.

• 52:53David Hoffman?

  This, on the other hand, feels like a very cool story. So I hope the best for you guys.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 52:59Speaker 01

  We're all in on this, so we just luck.

• 53:04David Hoffman?

  Bankless H, you guys know the deal. Crypto is risky. You can lose what you put in, but we are headed west. It's the frontier. It's not for everyone and we're glad you're with us on the bankless journey. Thanks a lot.