Why Stablecoins Need to Move Beyond the Dollar

Sebastian Serrano argued that the next stablecoin wave in Latin America will not be dollar-only. Ripio has tokenized six local currencies — Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, and Peru — and is trying to make them usable for payments, savings, and DeFi, not just as speculative assets. He said the core insight is that people in LatAm already live in local currencies day to day, even if they save in dollars, so the useful onchain product is often a local stablecoin rather than another USD wrapper.

He described Ripio as a long-built crypto infrastructure company that started with consumer wallets and exchanges in 2013, then shifted heavily into B2B partnerships with banks, fintechs, e-commerce, and brokerages. Serrano said licenses, local banking relationships, and access to real-time payment systems like Pix in Brazil and CBU in Argentina are what make zero-fee, one-to-one on-ramps possible. In his view, the real product is a “stablecoin sandwich”: users move between local rails and onchain balances without paying FX or losing money on onboarding.

Serrano said the local-currency strategy is already working: the suite launched in November last year, grew from about 800K AUM to 15 million, and now sees roughly 46,000 monthly active addresses. He expects the largest near-term use cases to be cross-border payments, local-currency DeFi borrowing, and localized markets such as prediction markets, with Ethereum EVM chains — especially Ethereum, Base, Celo, and World Chain — carrying most of the activity.