OpenTrade: LatAm Stablecoin Volumes Surge 89% to $324B

Latin America’s stablecoin economy has crossed an inflection point. According to OpenTrade’s new report “The Stablecoin Surge: Unlocking Growth Across Latin America,” published in collaboration with Ontop, Bitso, Juno, Avalanche, Littio and Figment, the region processed US$324 billion in stablecoin transactions in 2025 — an 89% year-on-year surge, and the largest single component of US$730 billion in total on-chain crypto value received across LatAm last year.

The report’s core argument is that stablecoins in Latin America have stopped being a crypto product for crypto users. They have become foundational financial infrastructure for savings, payments, payroll and cross-border commerce — adopted at a pace and scale that traditional banking has struggled to match.

Brazil 90%, Argentina 60%, Bolivia 530%

The country-level data is what makes the headline number more than an aggregate. In Brazil, stablecoins now account for over 90% of all on-chain crypto flows. In Argentina, the share is over 60%. Bolivia — historically a smaller crypto market — saw transaction value jump 530% between 2024 and 2025 amid mounting currency stress, with stablecoins forming a key component of those flows.

Industry surveys cited in the report point in the same direction. Fireblocks’ 2025 State of Stablecoins research found that around 71% of LatAm respondents use stablecoins for cross-border payments, the highest regional figure globally. Coinchange’s 2025 LATAM Crypto Regulation report shows that 34% of retail payments in Venezuela are now made in stablecoins — the largest stablecoin retail payment share in the region.

Four waves of adoption

Felipe Galvis, SVP of Business Development at OpenTrade, describes adoption as having moved through four distinct phases: freelancers receiving international payments and repatriating profits; retail savers seeking protection from devaluation or hyperinflation; a re-piping of remittance flows onto stablecoin rails; and now an emerging enterprise wave of cross-border payments, international payroll and treasury management.

“Hyperinflation episodes, with monthly inflation rates exceeding 50%, evaporate people’s purchasing power,” Galvis said in the report. “Retirees who worked their entire lives for a pension suddenly cannot afford basic groceries.” His framing positions stablecoin infrastructure not as a speculative product layer but as a defensive household balance sheet tool — one that has historically been available only to the wealthy through informal dollar markets.

The structural drivers Galvis cites are familiar but persistent. In Colombia, it takes around 3.5 more pesos every decade to buy a US dollar. In Brazil the ratio is roughly 3x, in Mexico 1.5–2x — even excluding hyperinflation episodes. As Leandro Davo, Argentina ecosystem lead at Avalanche, put it: “It’s not just crisis, it’s the memory of crisis, passed from one generation to the next. People here are raised with a survival instinct around money.”

Fintech as the distribution channel

The mass-market vehicle for this shift has been Latin America’s fintech sector — over 3,000 firms regionally, more than 20 of them unicorns, with an expected 27% CAGR through 2028 according to Latitud’s research. Nubank, the largest neobank globally by market capitalisation, services more than 60% of Brazil’s adult population, around 14% of Mexicans and roughly 10% of Colombians, with a forthcoming US market entry on the cards.

“Today, every Brazilian who has an account with Itaú or Nubank — around 90% of the population — has access to stablecoins, if they want them,” said Sthefano Batista, Head of LATAM at staking provider Figment.

What fintechs have done is abstract the blockchain layer entirely. As Christian Knudsen Daccach, CEO and Co-Founder of Colombian neobank Littio, explained: “Neobanks like ours are connecting the traditional rails to stablecoins — we integrate with Visa and MasterCard so users can pay anywhere, but under the hood, they’re using crypto.” Millions of Latin Americans now use stablecoins without knowing it, embedded in the payments, savings and remittance products they use daily.

The B2B 30x and corporate treasury

The faster-growing leg of the market is enterprise. Globally, Artemis Research data cited in the report shows B2B stablecoin payment volumes rising 30x in two years — from under US$100 million monthly in early 2023 to over US$3 billion by mid-2025. Latin America is one of the dominant origination regions for those flows.

Bitso, the regional crypto-financial-services platform serving approximately 9 million users, recently disclosed US$100 billion in total payments volume, of which roughly US$82 billion came from B2B customers largely operating on stablecoin rails. Bitso alone processes around US$6.5 billion in US-Mexico stablecoin flows annually — about 10% of the entire ~US$63–65 billion corridor.

“Money is moving onto the internet,” said Rodrigo Faria, Head of Product and Engineering at Bitso Business. “Systems like Pix are already programmable money — stablecoins just extend that globally.” Faria’s analogy is mobile roaming: cross-border payments should work like a phone abroad, with the consumer-side experience identical and the messy interconnect handled in the back end.

Ontop — a global payroll platform that processed over US$1 billion in 2025 across more than 150 countries — is in the middle of transitioning its infrastructure from traditional fiat to stablecoin rails. “Ontop is actively adopting stablecoins not because of crypto hype, but because of structural drivers: inflation, traditional banking friction, and slow fiat-based cross-border payment infrastructure,” said Julian Torres Gomez, CEO and Co-Founder.

Yield and the LatAm rate arbitrage

The next adjacent market is yield. Local benchmark rates create an unusual arbitrage opportunity for tokenised real-world asset products built on stablecoin rails. As Ben Reid, Head of Stablecoins at Bitso and Head of Juno, framed it: “Mexico’s treasury rate — the CETES — is about 7.5%, and Brazil’s SELIC is around 15%. Those are attractive yields compared to ~4% on US T-bills, which sets the mental benchmark for stablecoin yield.”

The opportunity Reid points to is two-directional. LatAm users gain access to dollar-denominated yields previously unreachable through capital controls or informal banking. International capital, in turn, gains exposure to higher local rates without taking on the regulatory and operational complexity of running balance sheets in each market individually.

Real-world asset tokenisation is the other adjacent frontier. Brazil has emerged as a global leader, with platforms like Mercado Bitcoin tokenising credit rights and receivables. “If the right regulation is implemented next year, real-world assets in Brazil will be bigger than payments because the industry is so big,” Batista said.

What’s blocking the next leg

The contributors converge on three remaining variables. The first is regulation. “Regulation is the number one challenge,” Batista said. Reid agreed: “If I had to pick one, regulation will be the make-or-break factor.” Fragmented frameworks across countries create uncertainty for issuers and limit interoperability — exactly the dynamic that CertiK’s recent State of Digital Asset Regulations report identified globally.

Brazil’s BCB Resolutions 519, 520 and 521 took full effect on 2 February 2026 with a 270-day grace period through October, creating the SPSAV authorisation framework and treating stablecoin flows as foreign exchange transactions. Mexico’s Ley Fintech, in place since 2018, established the legal scaffolding that allowed Nubank, Bitso and others to scale.

The second variable is education. Even where products exist, end-user trust has to be earned. As Davo put it: “The flywheel will start when stablecoin products stop looking like crypto apps and start looking like the financial apps people already use every day.”

The third is infrastructure — particularly on/off ramps, banking API connectivity and KYC/AML coverage. Batista flagged talent supply as a related constraint: “There’s a lack of qualified people and not enough talent to do this at a large-scale level. That’s why many international companies are coming to Brazil.”

FAQ

What is OpenTrade’s “The Stablecoin Surge” report?
It is a regional research report on stablecoin adoption in Latin America, published by stablecoin yield infrastructure firm OpenTrade in collaboration with Ontop, Bitso, Juno, Avalanche, Littio and Figment. The report finds LatAm stablecoin transaction volume reached US$324 billion in 2025, up 89% year-on-year, with country-level shares of crypto flows reaching over 90% in Brazil and over 60% in Argentina.

Why has Latin America led on stablecoin adoption?
According to the report, the structural drivers are persistent inflation, currency devaluation, capital controls and fragmented banking. Stablecoins solve everyday problems — slow and costly remittances, limited USD account access, inefficient cross-border payments and weak service from incumbent banks — that traditional systems have failed to address. Mexico’s remittance market alone is worth approximately US$63 billion, equivalent to 4% of GDP.

What does the B2B 30x figure refer to?
The figure comes from Artemis Research data cited in the OpenTrade report. Globally, B2B stablecoin payment volumes have grown roughly 30x in two years — from under US$100 million per month in early 2023 to over US$3 billion per month by mid-2025. Latin America is one of the dominant origination regions for those flows, with Bitso reporting US$82 billion in B2B volume largely operating on stablecoin rails.

The deeper signal in OpenTrade’s data is that the LatAm stablecoin market is no longer a single thesis. Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and Bolivia each have distinct combinations of inflation, banking penetration, regulation and use-case mix, and stablecoin products are increasingly being built to those specifications rather than forced through a generic dollar-pegged template. As local-currency stablecoins gain ground alongside USDT and USDC, the question for the next 24 months is whether on-chain FX between regional stablecoins becomes a real product category — and if it does, whether Latin America ends up exporting that infrastructure model to the rest of the emerging-market world.