The LatAm stablecoin moat is no longer infrastructure. It's distribution.
The B2B stablecoin market is a red ocean. The blue ocean is in consumers' pockets.
The first wave already happened. You probably missed it.
Between 2021 and 2024, while the crypto industry cycled through boom, bust, and regulatory battles, a quiet infrastructure revolution took place across Latin America. Bitso partnered with Circle for Mexico-US corridors. Tether launched MXNT, the first Mexican peso stablecoin. Conduit and Mural Pay built cross-border APIs. Ripio expanded enterprise services across seven countries. Then Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion in October 2024, signaling that stablecoin infrastructure had become strategic. By 2024, enterprise stablecoin adoption in the region had grown 100% year-over-year.
Now look at every layer of the B2B stack. The stablecoin issuers crowd the top: Circle has 1,100+ global partners and launched its Payments Network. Tether invested in Parfin in November 2025 to push USDT into institutional treasury operations. Below them, infrastructure providers compete on the same APIs: Stripe/Bridge, Conduit (which raised $36 million in May 2025 after 16x volume growth), Mural Pay, VelaFi, and Inswitch (acquired by TransNetwork in 2024) all offer cross-border payment flows. The exchanges battle for enterprise on-ramps: Bitso Business, Ripio, and Mercado Bitcoin (now partnered with Ripple). At the last mile, payout rails like dLocal, Félix Pago, Alfred, and RedotPay convert stablecoins to local currency.
Every layer is crowded. 15+ companies are competing for the same enterprise clients. Stablecoins now dominate LATAM crypto flows: 90% in Brazil alone. Enterprise volumes on platforms like Bitso doubled in six months. The B2B stablecoin market in Latin America is a red ocean. The infrastructure buildout is complete. The land grab is ending. Margins will compress.
Meanwhile, the consumer market is wide open.
Mercado Libre controls the wallet, the marketplace, and the payment processor. No other company in Latin America has all three. Nubank is embedding stablecoins into credit cards for 100 million customers. Rain powers stablecoin spending cards for dozens of crypto neobanks across the region.
The consumer war has begun.
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The Red Ocean: How B2B Got Crowded
The stablecoin story in Latin America started with businesses, not consumers. Economics drove the adoption.
A São Paulo manufacturer paying a Shenzhen supplier through traditional rails faces 3-5% SWIFT fees and three-day settlement. The same payment through stablecoin rails settles in minutes at a fraction of the cost. Brazilian companies figured this out early. By 2025, Central Bank officials reported that 90% of the country’s crypto flows were stablecoin-related. The primary use case was payments.
The numbers tell the story. CEMLA’s 2023 survey found that stablecoin adoption across participating Latin American jurisdictions was “generally considered to be low.” One year later, Bitso Business had 1,900 enterprise clients across payments, remittances, neobanks, and gaming. Stablecoin volumes on the platform doubled between H2 2024 and H1 2025. FX, treasury, and arbitrage operations surged to 45% of total volumes, overtaking remittances as the primary use case.
The infrastructure buildout followed a predictable pattern. First came the rails. Bitso partnered with Circle in late 2021 to enable crypto payments between Mexico and the US. Tribal Credit raised $40 million in a hybrid debt round funded partly by stablecoins in January 2022, pushing new use cases through its Bitso and Stellar partnerships. By 2025, Bitso had launched MXNB, an enterprise-grade peso stablecoin aligned with B2B transparency and performance requirements.
The enterprise market matured faster than anyone expected. Fireblocks reported that 100% of surveyed Latin American firms are either live, piloting, or planning stablecoin payment strategies. 62% use stablecoins to pay suppliers. 71% cite cross-border payments as their primary use case. The infrastructure buildout took three years. The adoption curve took eighteen months.
The result is saturation. Bitso, Circle, Stripe/Bridge, Conduit, Mural Pay, Ripio, Tether/Parfin, and a dozen others are all fighting for the same enterprise clients. The B2B cross-border payments market in Latin America is projected to reach $57 billion by 2030, but the players are already in position. New entrants face established relationships, integrated systems, and compressed margins.
The blue ocean opportunity lies elsewhere.
The Blue Ocean: Consumer Stablecoins
For three years, consumer stablecoin usage in Latin America meant one thing: savings. Argentines fleeing 100%+ inflation converted pesos to USDT. Venezuelans earning in bolivars stored value in USDC. Stablecoins represented 72% of all crypto purchases on Bitso in Argentina in 2024. Bitcoin was just 8%.
But holding is a feature. Spending is a business model.
The Argentine fintechs understood this first. Lemon Cash launched its Visa-branded crypto card in December 2021, offering 2% cashback in Bitcoin. Buenbit partnered with Mastercard the same year. Belo followed with cashback ranging from 2% to 21%. By 2024, Lemon Cash had grown to 5 million peak monthly active users with $5.9 billion in transaction volume. 78% of deposits were stablecoins. Users spent them daily.
The B2B infrastructure became consumer infrastructure. Wallets added cards. Cards added yields. The Argentine crypto wallets proved the model worked at scale. Now the giants are entering.
Mercado Pago’s Meli Dólar launch in August 2024 signaled the shift. The product is simple. Brazilian users buy a dollar-backed stablecoin through the Mercado Pago app. No fees. No crypto knowledge required. The issuer is Meli Uruguay SRL. The liquidity comes from Ripio, an exchange where Mercado Libre’s founder invested personally in 2021. 52 million active users in the region now have access to dollar-denominated stablecoins through an app they already use.
Nubank’s approach is more ambitious. Rather than launching a separate stablecoin product, Campos Neto announced testing stablecoin payments directly through credit cards. The partnership with Circle positions USDC as the primary stablecoin. Nubank isn’t asking users to learn crypto. They’re embedding stablecoins into a product 100 million people already use.
Behind both giants, infrastructure providers are racing to become the default rails. Rain, a Visa Principal Member, now powers stablecoin cards for KAST, RedotPay, ether.fi Cash, and dozens of other crypto neobanks. Their model is B2B2C: they don’t compete for users, they enable the companies that do.
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Why Now
The timing is not accidental. Three catalysts converged in 2024-2025 to unlock consumer stablecoin adoption.
The first catalyst is regulation. The US GENIUS Act, signed on July 18, 2025, created the first federal framework for payment stablecoins. It mandates 1:1 liquid reserves and monthly attestations. The EU’s MiCA stablecoin rules took effect on June 30, 2024. Brazil’s Central Bank published Resolutions 519, 520, and 521 in November 2025, bringing crypto companies under banking-style oversight. The rules take effect February 2, 2026, with capital requirements between $2 million and $7 million depending on services offered.
Brazil’s framework explicitly addresses consumer protection. Service providers must segregate client assets, disclose risks and fees, and implement conflict of interest safeguards. Stablecoin purchases and international transfers will be categorized as foreign exchange operations. Governor Gabriel Galipolo noted that 90% of Brazil’s crypto transaction volume is tied to stablecoins, many used to bypass traditional financial systems. The regulation legitimizes what’s already happening while creating barriers for undercapitalized players.
The second catalyst is infrastructure maturity. Visa expanded its stablecoin settlement program in July 2025 to support USDC, PYUSD, USDG, and EURC across Ethereum, Solana, Stellar, and Avalanche. The program reached $3.5 billion in annualized settlement volume by November 2025. Mastercard announced partnerships with Circle, Paxos, Fiserv, and PayPal in June 2025. The card networks that process global consumer transactions now support stablecoin settlement natively.
The third catalyst is strategic consolidation. Stripe’s $1.1 billion acquisition of Bridge in October 2024 was described as a “landmark deal for the stablecoin industry.” Since then, M&A bridging fiat and crypto has accelerated. In June 2025, Stripe acquired Privy, an embedded wallet provider supporting 75 million accounts. In October 2025, Modern Treasury acquired Beam for $40 million to add stablecoin rails to its payment infrastructure. The companies that enable stablecoin payments are being absorbed by the platforms that reach consumers.
MoneyGram’s CEO captured the transition: stablecoins are transforming their business “from the B2B back office to the B2C of how we deliver the service to our consumers.”
The Stakes
The consumer stablecoin market in Latin America is not a niche. In Argentina, over 30% of digital wallets now hold stablecoins for daily spending. According to the IMF, stablecoin flows in Latin America and the Caribbean reached 7.7% of GDP in 2024, the highest ratio globally. Africa followed at 6.7%. Fireblocks reports that 75% of surveyed firms see growing customer interest in stablecoin products. 40% of Latin American respondents cite customer demand as their primary adoption driver, more than any other region.
The competitive dynamics differ from B2B. Bitso built its moat through 1,900 enterprise clients and $80 billion in volume. Relationships and integration depth matter when you’re selling to treasury departments. In consumer markets, the moat is distribution. Whoever already has the users wins.
Each combatant has a different theory of victory.
Nubank is betting that distribution beats specialization. With 100 million customers, they don’t need the best crypto product. They need a good enough crypto product inside an app people already use. Their playbook is methodical. They entered crypto in 2022 with Bitcoin and Ethereum. By 2025, they offered 20+ cryptocurrencies including Cardano, Cosmos, Near Protocol, and Algorand. They added send and receive functionality for Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana. They started offering 4% annual yield on USDC holdings, one of the first major banks in the region to integrate stablecoin yields into everyday banking. Now one in four new Nubank Cripto investors chooses USDC. Roberto Campos Neto, the former Central Bank governor they hired as vice-chairman, is leading the stablecoin credit card pilot. In September 2025, they hired Michael Rihani from Coinbase as Director of Crypto. At Coinbase, Rihani led transfers, payments, and card products and helped launch $1 billion in Bitcoin-backed loans. Before that, he worked on Bitcoin payments at Tesla and built Apple Pay, Apple Card, and Apple Cash at Apple. Nubank is making crypto invisible inside a bank that 100 million people already trust. Their crypto division already serves 6.5 million customers.
Mercado Pago is betting that integration beats specialization. They control the wallet, the marketplace, and the payment processor. No other company in Latin America has all three. Their buildout has been deliberate. In May 2021, Mercado Libre became the first major Latin American public company to add Bitcoin to its treasury, now holding 570 BTC. Seven months later, they launched crypto trading in Brazil through Paxos, offering Bitcoin, Ethereum, and the USDP stablecoin to 56 million monthly active users. They invested in Mercado Bitcoin and Paxos in January 2022. They launched Mercado Coin, an Ethereum-based loyalty token developed with Ripio, in August 2022. They added USDP in Mexico in June 2023, USDC in Chile two months later. Then came Meli Dólar in August 2024, their own dollar-backed stablecoin issued by a Uruguayan subsidiary with Ripio as market maker. They expanded it to Mexico in 2025. The acquisition of Nikos DTVM signals expansion into asset management. Each piece extends the ecosystem. The strategic play is connecting stablecoins to checkout. Mercado Libre processed $51.5 billion in gross merchandise volume in 2024. If Brazilian consumers can pay merchants in a reais-pegged stablecoin and merchants settle in stablecoins, Mercado Pago captures both sides of the transaction. They haven’t announced this yet. But they’ve built every piece required to do it.
Rain is playing a different game entirely. They don’t compete for users. They power the companies that do. Rain is a Visa Principal Member that lets fintechs launch stablecoin-powered cards in weeks. Their infrastructure settles 100% of card payment volume directly in stablecoins on the Visa network. In January 2025, Rain raised a $250 million Series C led by ICONIQ Capital, valuing the company at $1.95 billion, just ten months after their Series A and four months after their Series B. The funding trajectory reflects explosive growth: active card base increased 30x in the past year, while annualized payment volume grew 38x. Rain now facilitates over $3 billion in annualized transactions across 200+ partners including Western Union, Nuvei, KAST, RedotPay, and ether.fi Cash, with reach extending to 2.5 billion potential users across 150+ countries. They hold 80%+ market share of crypto card volumes globally. Rain’s thesis is that most fintechs won’t build card infrastructure from scratch. They’ll rent it. Every crypto wallet that adds a spending card, every neobank that offers stablecoin accounts, every payroll platform that pays in USDC becomes a Rain customer. The B2B2C model means Rain wins regardless of which consumer app dominates.
The B2B war took three years. The consumer war will be faster. Infrastructure exists, regulation is arriving, and distribution giants are entering. The next eighteen months will determine who captures Latin America’s consumer stablecoin market.
The pipes are built. The war is for the users.
Sources:
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