Key Takeaways
Ripio CEO Sebastian Serrano argues that Latin America's deep stablecoin savings and real-time payment habits require local-currency stablecoins and zero-fee one-to-one ramps, not dollar-only tokens, to unlock payments and DeFi.
Summary
Sebastian Serrano, co-founder and CEO of Latin American crypto fintech Ripio, argues that the next phase of stablecoin growth is local-currency tokens, not just dollar tokens, because people need them to pay bills, borrow, and settle contracts in their own currency. The conversation spends most of its time on Ripio's business — its decade of license-building across six countries, its B2B "crypto-as-a-service" role behind Mercado Libre and Argentine brokers, and its "wrapped fiat" suite launched in November 2025 — with cross-border payment mechanics, FX carry trades, and DeFi lending in emerging markets as supporting threads.
Serrano is a useful guide because Ripio has operated in the region since 2013, first as Argentina's original Bitcoin wallet, and now holds money-transmission and payment licenses across Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, and Peru plus a US money-transmission license. The reader should come away with a concrete picture of how local-currency stablecoins are being distributed (through wallets and fintechs, not retail), what the early numbers look like, and why Serrano thinks tokenization is progressing from the most liquid asset — the dollar — downward into everything else.
Local-currency stablecoins sell on utility, not savings demand
Serrano's core argument is that dollar stablecoins dominate because people want to save in dollars, but local stablecoins have no intrinsic savings demand — people use them, because nearly every contract and bill in Latin America is denominated in local currency. He says he would have predicted three years ago that local stablecoins had no demand; the demand surfaced from integration work, not from user requests.
The origin story is a diagnosis of broken non-custodial wallet onboarding. Ripio built ramps for a large non-custodial wallet and saw "awful" conversion and "horrendous" retention. Digging in, Serrano found the call to action differs fundamentally: a neobank like Revolut or Mercado Pago opens on "deposit," while MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet, and Warpcast all open on "buy." A Brazilian user completes 5–10 minutes of onboarding, sends 1,000 reais via Pix, and receives 950 in USDC or USDT after FX and spreads — "your first experience using crypto is losing money."
Ripio's fix was to make onboarding one-to-one: zero fees, and a deposit that arrives on chain at par. Send 1,000 reais, get 1,000 reais on chain. The business model is managing the float to subsidize the ramps, the same pattern Serrano says every fintech uses — neobanks subsidize onboarding and earn on credit cards.
"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."
"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."
He also argues DeFi is "all backwards" for emerging markets. In developed markets people post Bitcoin or ETH as collateral to borrow dollars; in emerging markets people already save in dollars, so they should post USDC as collateral and borrow local currency — which requires a local-currency representation on chain. Other cited use cases: prediction markets localized to local rivalries (he names the Boca–River Superclásico), and remittances, where he says a Uniswap swap from WBRL to WARS yields about 315,000 pesos versus 285,000 via Western Union on a 1,000-real transfer — roughly a 10% difference — because traditional providers must wire through the US and hold treasury in both countries.
Tokenization moves from the most liquid asset downward
Serrano frames local-currency tokenization as the next step in a progression, not a separate thesis. A decade ago startups tried to tokenize sneakers; what actually worked was tokenizing the most liquid asset first. He cites $23 trillion in US dollars with roughly 1–1.5% tokenized, and a Treasury estimate of 10% within a decade. Equities, treasuries, and bonds are now the fast-growing category, and local currencies come next.
He sizes the opportunity: non-USD currencies total about $100 trillion, five times the US dollar, with roughly half in China; Brazil and Mexico alone account for $40 trillion. Yields are far higher — he puts Argentine peso yields at 25% and the Brazilian real at 13–15%. Against that, local-currency tokenization today is "0.002%," and Ripio's stated goal is to make it 1%.
Ripio's moat is licenses and payment-rail plumbing, not APIs
Serrano describes Ripio's arc as close to Coinbase's: founded in 2013 as Argentina's first Bitcoin wallet, expanded across Latin America, then around 2020–21 pivoted to B2B crypto-as-a-service for banks, fintechs, and e-commerce. The company holds local entities, PSP licenses, and banking relationships across the region plus a US money-transmission license.
That licensing work is what connects Ripio to real-time payment networks, which Serrano rates highly: Pix in Brazil, CVU in Argentina, Bre-B in Colombia, and a Chilean equivalent. He says these are cheaper, instantaneous, and better integrated than US rails, and that Pix payments in Brazil now exceed card payments. The host's framing — that the stablecoin boom exposed two classes of companies, API aggregators versus licensed fintechs that went through the nation-state apparatus — is the context for Serrano's claim that a decade of plumbing is the actual asset.
The distribution evidence Serrano cites: Ripio is the crypto-as-a-service provider behind Mercado Libre and its fintech Mercado Pago, handling buy/sell/hold for most tokens and helping launch Mercado's loyalty token, with 35 million B2B2C users and 100–200 transactions per second. He says almost every Argentine stock broker offering crypto runs on Ripio infrastructure, and that YOL, which he calls Argentina's largest broker, has integrated WARS.
Wrapped fiat: early traction and a liquidity problem AMMs only partly solve
Ripio launched the wrapped-fiat suite in November 2025 with six currencies — Argentine peso, Brazilian real, Colombian peso, Mexican peso, Chilean peso, and Peruvian sol — across 10 EVM chains. Serrano gives these figures roughly a year in:
Ripio is currently the sole on-chain liquidity provider across networks and pools, which Serrano expects to change as competitors arrive. He is candid that AMMs are poorly suited to FX: price discovery is not the problem because FX has references, but exposure and settlement are. AMMs will capture $200–$1,000 trades; larger trades need order books or RFQ systems, which he likens to Hyperliquid or StableFX. He says Ripio is experimenting with Uniswap hooks to push a reference price into the pool.
Chain distribution skews to Ethereum mainnet for size, with activity on Base, Celo, and World Chain. Serrano credits Celo with the best strategy for local stablecoins and FX, and says World Chain has the most active addresses for Ripio's suite and integrated the ramps first, with about 6 million active users in the region. Ripio has deliberately stayed EVM-only — no Solana — on the logic of playing to the team's strengths.
Carry trades and the stablecoin sandwich are already live
Serrano describes a behavioral split across the region. In Argentina, Venezuela, and Bolivia, people know the peso-dollar rate by memory and buy dollars with whatever is left at month's end. In Brazil, the real has been strong enough for long enough that many Brazilians do not know the rate and think in reais; he says Brazilian bonds pay 13–15%, enabling a large carry trade on Brazilian rails with a stable exchange rate over the past decade.
That carry trade now runs on Ripio's tokens: Argentines are buying WBRL, the Brazilian real stablecoin, to earn Brazilian yields from Argentina. He also describes the "stablecoin sandwich" as increasingly common — fintechs settling in stablecoins in the back end while the user never knows crypto is involved, which he expects to be the dominant pattern.
On cross-border mechanics, he walks through Brazil-to-Argentina: a father paying for a child studying medicine in Buenos Aires sends Pix to Western Union, which next-day transfers via CBU to the Argentine account, typically costing about 10% in FX. The reverse direction is more advanced because Argentine product teams are more crypto-native — scanning a Pix QR code from Mercado Pago or most Argentine fintechs settles through a stablecoin in the back end. Chile and Peru lag because they lack real-time payment networks, but Serrano says everyone is copying Pix.
Incumbents and regulators are split on local stablecoins
Serrano expects local central banks and regulators to be better aligned with local stablecoins than with dollar tokens, because issuance means buying local government debt. Banks are the likely losers: he says they already face pressure from losing client relationships, and DeFi will be far more competitive because banks pay essentially nothing on deposits — he puts the figure at 0.01%. He concedes the category is not yet on anyone's radar and that Ripio may be "early or wrong," but says the company is betting everything on it.
"Maybe we're early or wrong. But we're betting all on it."
"Maybe we're early or wrong. But we're betting all on it."
He says he has not seen anyone else pursuing the same strategy. The host's read — a central on-chain clearing house of tokenized fiat spiderwebbing down to local payment rails, with a circular economy forming as users stop redeeming to the edges — is one Serrano endorses: "I hope so. That way people don't have to redeem anymore... you can have a very good financial experience without having to need a bank. This is truly bankless."
What to watch
The unresolved question is whether Ripio's float-subsidized, zero-fee ramp model survives competition. Serrano is the only LP in his own pools today, which means the quoted Uniswap FX savings are not yet a market-clearing price; he expects outside LPs to demand well above 3–4% given emerging-market currency depreciation. The other open item is transaction size. If RFQ and order-book venues for on-chain FX mature, the $200 average swap becomes a retail channel and the institutional flow moves elsewhere — and Ripio's value shifts from being the venue to being the licensed bridge between 10 chains and six countries' payment rails. The 1% target against a 0.002% base is the number to track.
Related Companies
Business Highlights
- Ripio redesigned its ramps so users pay zero fees and receive a one-to-one onchain deposit, subsidizing the cost by managing the float — mirroring how neobanks subsidize onboarding and monetize elsewhere.
- After five years serving banks, fintechs and e-commerce, Ripio expanded its infrastructure to non-custodial wallets and crypto protocols, discovering that poor conversion and retention in those wallets created a product opportunity.
- Ripio is currently the sole onchain liquidity provider across all networks and pools for its local stablecoins, effectively bootstrapping the market itself until third-party LPs arrive.
- Ripio expects companies to migrate FX onto its rails because onchain settlement requires less capital and is faster than traditional correspondent-banking FX, even though LPs will demand well above 3-4% yield.
Key Quotes
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.
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.
You send a thousand reais and then you end up buying it or USDC or USDT and you now have 950 in it. So your first experience using crypto is losing money.
You send a thousand reais and then you end up buying it or USDC or USDT and you now have 950 in it. So your first experience using crypto is losing money.
DeFi is all backwards. In emerging markets people save in dollars... They should put USDC as collateral and they should be borrowing local currency.
DeFi is all backwards. In emerging markets people save in dollars... They should put USDC as collateral and they should be borrowing local currency.
DeFi is going to be so much more competitive than local banks. They pay nothing for deposits. So that is going to put pressure.
DeFi is going to be so much more competitive than local banks. They pay nothing for deposits. So that is going to put pressure.
AMMs are very good at finding price and FX markets have references. So price discovery is not really the issue. Large transactions are going to require order books.
AMMs are very good at finding price and FX markets have references. So price discovery is not really the issue. Large transactions are going to require order books.
We have not heard of anyone else with the same strategy that we're doing today. So maybe we're early or wrong, but we're betting all on it.
We have not heard of anyone else with the same strategy that we're doing today. So maybe we're early or wrong, but we're betting all on it.
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Key Takeaways
Ripio CEO Sebastian Serrano argues that Latin America's deep stablecoin savings and real-time payment habits require local-currency stablecoins and zero-fee one-to-one ramps, not dollar-only tokens, to unlock payments and DeFi.
Summary
Sebastian Serrano, co-founder and CEO of Latin American crypto fintech Ripio, argues that the next phase of stablecoin growth is local-currency tokens, not just dollar tokens, because people need them to pay bills, borrow, and settle contracts in their own currency. The conversation spends most of its time on Ripio's business — its decade of license-building across six countries, its B2B "crypto-as-a-service" role behind Mercado Libre and Argentine brokers, and its "wrapped fiat" suite launched in November 2025 — with cross-border payment mechanics, FX carry trades, and DeFi lending in emerging markets as supporting threads.
Serrano is a useful guide because Ripio has operated in the region since 2013, first as Argentina's original Bitcoin wallet, and now holds money-transmission and payment licenses across Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, and Peru plus a US money-transmission license. The reader should come away with a concrete picture of how local-currency stablecoins are being distributed (through wallets and fintechs, not retail), what the early numbers look like, and why Serrano thinks tokenization is progressing from the most liquid asset — the dollar — downward into everything else.
Local-currency stablecoins sell on utility, not savings demand
Serrano's core argument is that dollar stablecoins dominate because people want to save in dollars, but local stablecoins have no intrinsic savings demand — people use them, because nearly every contract and bill in Latin America is denominated in local currency. He says he would have predicted three years ago that local stablecoins had no demand; the demand surfaced from integration work, not from user requests.
The origin story is a diagnosis of broken non-custodial wallet onboarding. Ripio built ramps for a large non-custodial wallet and saw "awful" conversion and "horrendous" retention. Digging in, Serrano found the call to action differs fundamentally: a neobank like Revolut or Mercado Pago opens on "deposit," while MetaMask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet, and Warpcast all open on "buy." A Brazilian user completes 5–10 minutes of onboarding, sends 1,000 reais via Pix, and receives 950 in USDC or USDT after FX and spreads — "your first experience using crypto is losing money."
Ripio's fix was to make onboarding one-to-one: zero fees, and a deposit that arrives on chain at par. Send 1,000 reais, get 1,000 reais on chain. The business model is managing the float to subsidize the ramps, the same pattern Serrano says every fintech uses — neobanks subsidize onboarding and earn on credit cards.
"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."
"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."
He also argues DeFi is "all backwards" for emerging markets. In developed markets people post Bitcoin or ETH as collateral to borrow dollars; in emerging markets people already save in dollars, so they should post USDC as collateral and borrow local currency — which requires a local-currency representation on chain. Other cited use cases: prediction markets localized to local rivalries (he names the Boca–River Superclásico), and remittances, where he says a Uniswap swap from WBRL to WARS yields about 315,000 pesos versus 285,000 via Western Union on a 1,000-real transfer — roughly a 10% difference — because traditional providers must wire through the US and hold treasury in both countries.
Tokenization moves from the most liquid asset downward
Serrano frames local-currency tokenization as the next step in a progression, not a separate thesis. A decade ago startups tried to tokenize sneakers; what actually worked was tokenizing the most liquid asset first. He cites $23 trillion in US dollars with roughly 1–1.5% tokenized, and a Treasury estimate of 10% within a decade. Equities, treasuries, and bonds are now the fast-growing category, and local currencies come next.
He sizes the opportunity: non-USD currencies total about $100 trillion, five times the US dollar, with roughly half in China; Brazil and Mexico alone account for $40 trillion. Yields are far higher — he puts Argentine peso yields at 25% and the Brazilian real at 13–15%. Against that, local-currency tokenization today is "0.002%," and Ripio's stated goal is to make it 1%.
Ripio's moat is licenses and payment-rail plumbing, not APIs
Serrano describes Ripio's arc as close to Coinbase's: founded in 2013 as Argentina's first Bitcoin wallet, expanded across Latin America, then around 2020–21 pivoted to B2B crypto-as-a-service for banks, fintechs, and e-commerce. The company holds local entities, PSP licenses, and banking relationships across the region plus a US money-transmission license.
That licensing work is what connects Ripio to real-time payment networks, which Serrano rates highly: Pix in Brazil, CVU in Argentina, Bre-B in Colombia, and a Chilean equivalent. He says these are cheaper, instantaneous, and better integrated than US rails, and that Pix payments in Brazil now exceed card payments. The host's framing — that the stablecoin boom exposed two classes of companies, API aggregators versus licensed fintechs that went through the nation-state apparatus — is the context for Serrano's claim that a decade of plumbing is the actual asset.
The distribution evidence Serrano cites: Ripio is the crypto-as-a-service provider behind Mercado Libre and its fintech Mercado Pago, handling buy/sell/hold for most tokens and helping launch Mercado's loyalty token, with 35 million B2B2C users and 100–200 transactions per second. He says almost every Argentine stock broker offering crypto runs on Ripio infrastructure, and that YOL, which he calls Argentina's largest broker, has integrated WARS.
Wrapped fiat: early traction and a liquidity problem AMMs only partly solve
Ripio launched the wrapped-fiat suite in November 2025 with six currencies — Argentine peso, Brazilian real, Colombian peso, Mexican peso, Chilean peso, and Peruvian sol — across 10 EVM chains. Serrano gives these figures roughly a year in:
Ripio is currently the sole on-chain liquidity provider across networks and pools, which Serrano expects to change as competitors arrive. He is candid that AMMs are poorly suited to FX: price discovery is not the problem because FX has references, but exposure and settlement are. AMMs will capture $200–$1,000 trades; larger trades need order books or RFQ systems, which he likens to Hyperliquid or StableFX. He says Ripio is experimenting with Uniswap hooks to push a reference price into the pool.
Chain distribution skews to Ethereum mainnet for size, with activity on Base, Celo, and World Chain. Serrano credits Celo with the best strategy for local stablecoins and FX, and says World Chain has the most active addresses for Ripio's suite and integrated the ramps first, with about 6 million active users in the region. Ripio has deliberately stayed EVM-only — no Solana — on the logic of playing to the team's strengths.
Carry trades and the stablecoin sandwich are already live
Serrano describes a behavioral split across the region. In Argentina, Venezuela, and Bolivia, people know the peso-dollar rate by memory and buy dollars with whatever is left at month's end. In Brazil, the real has been strong enough for long enough that many Brazilians do not know the rate and think in reais; he says Brazilian bonds pay 13–15%, enabling a large carry trade on Brazilian rails with a stable exchange rate over the past decade.
That carry trade now runs on Ripio's tokens: Argentines are buying WBRL, the Brazilian real stablecoin, to earn Brazilian yields from Argentina. He also describes the "stablecoin sandwich" as increasingly common — fintechs settling in stablecoins in the back end while the user never knows crypto is involved, which he expects to be the dominant pattern.
On cross-border mechanics, he walks through Brazil-to-Argentina: a father paying for a child studying medicine in Buenos Aires sends Pix to Western Union, which next-day transfers via CBU to the Argentine account, typically costing about 10% in FX. The reverse direction is more advanced because Argentine product teams are more crypto-native — scanning a Pix QR code from Mercado Pago or most Argentine fintechs settles through a stablecoin in the back end. Chile and Peru lag because they lack real-time payment networks, but Serrano says everyone is copying Pix.
Incumbents and regulators are split on local stablecoins
Serrano expects local central banks and regulators to be better aligned with local stablecoins than with dollar tokens, because issuance means buying local government debt. Banks are the likely losers: he says they already face pressure from losing client relationships, and DeFi will be far more competitive because banks pay essentially nothing on deposits — he puts the figure at 0.01%. He concedes the category is not yet on anyone's radar and that Ripio may be "early or wrong," but says the company is betting everything on it.
"Maybe we're early or wrong. But we're betting all on it."
"Maybe we're early or wrong. But we're betting all on it."
He says he has not seen anyone else pursuing the same strategy. The host's read — a central on-chain clearing house of tokenized fiat spiderwebbing down to local payment rails, with a circular economy forming as users stop redeeming to the edges — is one Serrano endorses: "I hope so. That way people don't have to redeem anymore... you can have a very good financial experience without having to need a bank. This is truly bankless."
What to watch
The unresolved question is whether Ripio's float-subsidized, zero-fee ramp model survives competition. Serrano is the only LP in his own pools today, which means the quoted Uniswap FX savings are not yet a market-clearing price; he expects outside LPs to demand well above 3–4% given emerging-market currency depreciation. The other open item is transaction size. If RFQ and order-book venues for on-chain FX mature, the $200 average swap becomes a retail channel and the institutional flow moves elsewhere — and Ripio's value shifts from being the venue to being the licensed bridge between 10 chains and six countries' payment rails. The 1% target against a 0.002% base is the number to track.
Business Highlights
- Ripio redesigned its ramps so users pay zero fees and receive a one-to-one onchain deposit, subsidizing the cost by managing the float — mirroring how neobanks subsidize onboarding and monetize elsewhere.
- After five years serving banks, fintechs and e-commerce, Ripio expanded its infrastructure to non-custodial wallets and crypto protocols, discovering that poor conversion and retention in those wallets created a product opportunity.
- Ripio is currently the sole onchain liquidity provider across all networks and pools for its local stablecoins, effectively bootstrapping the market itself until third-party LPs arrive.
- Ripio expects companies to migrate FX onto its rails because onchain settlement requires less capital and is faster than traditional correspondent-banking FX, even though LPs will demand well above 3-4% yield.
Key Quotes
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.
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.
You send a thousand reais and then you end up buying it or USDC or USDT and you now have 950 in it. So your first experience using crypto is losing money.
You send a thousand reais and then you end up buying it or USDC or USDT and you now have 950 in it. So your first experience using crypto is losing money.
DeFi is all backwards. In emerging markets people save in dollars... They should put USDC as collateral and they should be borrowing local currency.
DeFi is all backwards. In emerging markets people save in dollars... They should put USDC as collateral and they should be borrowing local currency.
DeFi is going to be so much more competitive than local banks. They pay nothing for deposits. So that is going to put pressure.
DeFi is going to be so much more competitive than local banks. They pay nothing for deposits. So that is going to put pressure.
AMMs are very good at finding price and FX markets have references. So price discovery is not really the issue. Large transactions are going to require order books.
AMMs are very good at finding price and FX markets have references. So price discovery is not really the issue. Large transactions are going to require order books.
We have not heard of anyone else with the same strategy that we're doing today. So maybe we're early or wrong, but we're betting all on it.
We have not heard of anyone else with the same strategy that we're doing today. So maybe we're early or wrong, but we're betting all on it.
