# Tokenizing Latin America: Six Currencies, One Financial System | Sebastian Serrano *Author: David Hoffman* *Published: Nov 9, 2026* *Source: https://www.bankless.com/podcast/tokenizing-latin-america-six-currencies-one-financial-system* --- David Hoffman: [0:00] Welcome to Bankless, where today we're talking about the tokenization of local fiat currencies of Latin America's biggest six economies, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Chile, Peru, and Mexico. David Hoffman: [0:11] 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 back-end 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 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 blockchain chains 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. David Hoffman: [1:08] 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, Zello, WorldChain, and a few other EVMs as well. So a pretty bankless story if you ask me. And with that context out of the way, let's go hear from Sebastian from Ripio. David Hoffman: [1:31] 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. Sebastian Serrano: [1:45] 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. David Hoffman: [1:55] It has been a long time coming you and i met two years ago at alif which was the kind of the crypto pop-up city that happens in buenos aires but you have been operating crypto since before i was an adult forever yeah maybe you can kind of just like teach us something about where latin america is with regards to crypto so bankless sisters will know that argentina adopted stable coins 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, you know, 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? Sebastian Serrano: [2:38] So crypto, especially in Argentina and across Latam, is one of the regions that started to adopt it as adopting it before i think like well the high inflation, weak institutions has led to people to find alternatives i got into crypto, 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 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 using it I didn't even knew that it was 21, million bitcoins and then I started to learn it and paid so started to pay in bitcoin in 2012 and initially on forums and that led to build a company, the you love patagonia most of the roads in patagonia are made of ripio it's kind of like i grew up in patagonia so the metaphor of the company is to build roads to access to crypto, and that has evolved from from there like and that has and i and there is a lot of adoption but also, the level of sophistication. Sebastian Serrano: [3:59] Is deeper. Like especially in Argentina, Venezuela, like people understand like deeper the technology and, we see the most complex use cases around it with a lot of integration into the economy, which I think like in other countries, In other countries, you don't see it that profound. I have a friend, for example, that went to a dealership to buy a car. They wanted the payment in cash. Sebastian Serrano: [4:30] This guy said, well, I don't have cash. He said, well, will you take USDT? And the dealership said, yes, obviously. And he had a trust 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 it's a little bit different about other countries is like, you see a lot of like savings in stable coins. 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 like seeking opportunity. In countries like Argentina, people is actually trying to find a safe haven. And crypto has been that for a lot of people. David Hoffman: [5:25] Now, there is, you know, 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? Sebastian Serrano: [5:47] 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. David Hoffman: [6:27] Argentines think and denominate in the dollar, whereas Brazilians denominate in the reals. Sebastian Serrano: [6:34] And many Brazilians don't know the exchange rate. It has been so stable that it will just say five. One dollar, five reals. 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% to 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 issue in local currencies for all Latin American countries. And we did Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, and Peru. And we are seeing a lot of Argentinians buying WBRL, 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 Reals is strong. And this is, yeah. But it's very common to, like 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. David Hoffman: [7:58] 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. 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 it is 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. Sebastian Serrano: [8:40] We started in 2013. Initially as the first Bitcoin wallet in Argentina. We grew that across Latin America. We operate in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Peru, Uruguay. We have a money transmission license in the U.S. As everything in crypto, we started very retail. So wallet exchange, And about 2020, 2021, 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, crypto as a service provider, to enable banks, fintechs, e-commerce to integrate crypto. That has grown a lot. B2B has been the focus for the last five years. David Hoffman: [9:28] 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 whitelisting service in the back end 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? Sebastian Serrano: [9:51] Something like that. Yeah. And that has grown a lot. We are the crypto service provider of Mercado Libre. Mercado Libre is like the Amazon of Latin America. David Hoffman: [10:02] Amazon or Stripe? Sebastian Serrano: [10:04] 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 Mercado Pavo. It's 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 is very large. We have like 35 million users in B2B2C. Because of the size of MercadoLibre and because the loyalty program runs in crypto, 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 license, bus 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 tokenize all of these stablecoins, which I think is a, key piece of infrastructure for the next phase of crypto and then and there's there's no not being a simple. David Hoffman: [11:34] Right there was a during the like stable coin boom about a year ago right when circle was going public there was just like a big vc like stable coin 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 stable coins and everyone was learning how about how to invest in the stable coin 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. It 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 the hard things, like a true banking and true exchange. David Hoffman: [12:44] So you just said that you've been in 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 is having all of these licenses important? What does that enable for you? Sebastian Serrano: [12:59] One of the things is being able to connect to the real-time payment networks. So LATAM, actually... It 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. Sebastian Serrano: [13:20] The abuse that the governments have done to the currencies. But you have PIX in Brazil, CBO in Argentina, Breve, Clave. These are all real-time payment networks that work a lot better than what you have in the U.S. Or in many other countries. They are very inexpensive. They are instantaneous. They are integrated both the banking transfers and also the. Sebastian Serrano: [13:48] Payment infrastructure. So you can scan a QR code and make a payment. And this has, like, grow, like, PIX payments are larger than card payments in Brazil. And because of, like, how well, how much more adapted this got. So being able to have all this local infrastructure, BIMBAS, 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. Sebastian Serrano: [14:20] And to be honest there is a lot 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 asked me like three years ago, I will have say, well, but there's not going to be demand for local currencies, like local stablecoins. People don't buy local stablecoins. Like people, the dollar has demand. Because people are saving dollars. Sebastian Serrano: [14:58] And they just want to buy the asset to protect themselves. Why are they going to buy a local stablecoin? And the reality is it's 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 said, well, we should start working with crypto companies. We should use all this infrastructure to help non-custodial wallets, crypto protocols, to use our infrastructure, our RAMs, to get service and grow across Latin America. We started to work with one non-custodial wallet. We build ramps for them so that they could launch in Argentina and they do it. And immediately after we see, well, this is awful. 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. Sebastian Serrano: [16:17] We look at this non-custodial wallet and it's horrendous. And then we started to dig into what is happening, what is happening to this non-custodial wallet from a very large company. Decent 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, Mercado Pago, the first call to action is deposit. The button is even in a different color. You open Metamask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet, WordApp, whatever, in every non-custodial wallet today, the call to action is buy. You click buy. There is a bunch of on-ramps that appear. You click that. You have 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 PixID. You send a thousand reals and then you end up buying ETH or USDC or USDT and you now have $950 in it. So your first experience using crypto is losing money. David Hoffman: [17:30] 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. Sebastian Serrano: [17:58] Yeah, so you pay FX and spreads. You want to go back, you pay again. So you now end up with 900. Sebastian Serrano: [18:05] 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 saw, well, first we need to make the onboarding one-to-one. So the user has to base 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 is, can go and click deposit, do the onboarding, get the PIX ID. They send a thousand reals and they have to get a thousand reals on chain. And that's why we said, well, and then build a business model around 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 unparalleled experience with a fintech. Like it's like the same experience they have on Nubank or Mercado Pago or Revolut, like deposit, get, send a thousand reals, have a thousand reals, send a thousand pesos, have a thousand pesos. And then that, that, that was the initial trigger. But then, then we thought, well, like when we started, when we launched it, immediately sees really good conversion rates. It is growing really fast. It's like AUM is growing 30% month over month. Sebastian Serrano: [19:23] We also started to see all these other use cases. Sebastian Serrano: [19:27] If you look DeFi, it's all backwards. In emerging markets, people saving dollars. You go into Morpho or Aave 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. David Hoffman: [19:44] They're trying to be defensive, to put your point earlier. They're being defensive with their capital rather than speculative. Sebastian Serrano: [19:50] So they should put UCC or UCT 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 these local stablecoins on-chain so that we can flip this and be useful for people in emerging markets. 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 effects 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. Sebastian Serrano: [20:44] It's already better for small transactions than the traditional system. If you go to WISE and you try to send 1,000 reals to Argentina, you're going to get 285,000 pesos. If you do it already on Uniswap with WRL 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 volatile currencies, a traditional revitance company will have to send wire to the US and then wire back into the destination. 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 to grow. Sebastian Serrano: [21:44] 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. 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. David Hoffman: [22:17] Yeah, Argentine soccer team. Sebastian Serrano: [22:18] Yeah. The stadium's in fire. Every time they play the Super Classico. So it's very important, but unique to Argentina. And Argentinians care 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 stablecoin. So we got extremely bullish about all this. and we are basically putting all our efforts right now into this product, which has the local stablecoin, RAMs that are one-to-one, on-chain liquidity so that you can go in and out and trade it to dollar stable coins and building all that infrastructure like one API for all of them. And we're extremely bullish about that. David Hoffman: [23:16] I want to back up a little bit and go back to the on-ramp piece. There's that idea that the thing that really fueled the growth of the internet was ads. Ads as opposed to like microtransactions, 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 Coinbases, the Krakens, I'm localizing our conversation to America so the listeners can track along. The on-ramp is not where they make their money. 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 rent obviously but like the the fraud costs that Sebastian Serrano: [24:29] Is true for every fintech that that is true for it's general it's not just for crypto like if you look at the the if you look at new bank or like any new rank, they there's this they're subsidized a lot of the, going in into the app and they make their money from another thing like for example in new bank it is credit so the credit card is the profit generating piece or, of the fintech so this this is not this is not just on crypto it is in every financial service you try to make the on 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. David Hoffman: [25:26] You've coined the Argentine peso, the Brazilian real, the Colombian local currency. I don't know what that's called. Six different local currencies. Yeah. Yeah. And so like the business model that Ripio holds here is like a stable coin issuer. Yes. So it's like a money market fund in the respective countries. Sebastian Serrano: [25:47] And you're making that bet. David Hoffman: [25:49] Right, because you have all of the licenses, the regulatory compliance that enables you to do this. And so like 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... Sebastian Serrano: [26:32] Velocity is enormous. 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. 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 fast. Sebastian Serrano: [26:59] You can look at it as the opportunity in two ways. One is like the one that was describing true 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. So if we talk like a decade ago, Well, I'll 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. Sebastian Serrano: [27:34] 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 U.S. dollar. As there's 23 trillion US dollars, 1% of that is tokenized, 1.5%. 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 in 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 a hundred trillion. So it's five times the US. Half of that is China. Sebastian Serrano: [28:44] LATAM, if you just, Brazil and Mexico is $40 trillion. So this is quite substantial. And yields are much higher. So like yields of Argentinian pesos is 25% right now. Brazilian reals is 13, 15. So it's smaller money supply, but larger yields. How much of that gets tokenized? Well, we'll try to, today is zero. It's 0.00%. two percent we're gonna try to make it one percent. David Hoffman: [29:18] Can you walk me through a bank to bank transfer across some of these countries so like like brazil to argentina for example like without without using crypto or blockchain like how how does a payment today go from a brazilian bank to an argentine bank Sebastian Serrano: [29:35] So it depends and and 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 father sending money, they're more likely going to use Weiss. They're going to do a PICS transfer to Weiss, and Weiss is going to next day 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%. 10%. On the exchange. The other way around is actually. Sebastian Serrano: [30:27] Much more evolved because of picks on the other side. So there is a lot of companies like you can from Mercado Pago or almost every fintech scan a QR code in Brazil, and pay that picks in Brazil. In the back, there's likely going to be some crypto involved with a stablecoin sandwich. That is already very developed and very integrated into the Argentinian apps. Maybe because the product teams in Argentina are more crypto savvy and they find ways to connect these things. So it varies but Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico have very good payment networks and. Sebastian Serrano: [31:14] Very 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 Pix, and everybody's launching their own version of Pix across the region. And that together with the understanding of crypto, it's all getting interwined and connected. 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 know that they're using it. David Hoffman: [32:07] So with all of these currencies that you've tokenized, the six currencies, is that a B2B to see? Product? Is that also a consumer product as well? Who is that really for? And how is that really kind of changing the topology of like bank payments across countries? Sebastian Serrano: [32:26] So we call it a platform. So first thing is having a mint account. So being able to mint and redeem these stable coins 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 yoll which is the largest stock broker in argentina already has wr's integrated and we're making many other, integrations like this so that crypt as a service is kind of like a a way to build distribution of like crypto and our assets, then we then have like the ramps product this is like the offering of one-to-one RAM so that you can build, a very frictionless onboarding into into your app we power work up coinbase wallet we just started to work with mini pay there are many, there's a wallet that's very popular in brazil called picnic that is starting to use us so in the last quarter like 10 fintechs and and, non-custodial wallets started to integrate all this product. Together with that, we have a very strong markets team that provides on-chain liquidity. With that, we are showing the stable effects of Circle. Sebastian Serrano: [33:52] So that is a big component of. Sebastian Serrano: [33:59] Making this useful. And a lot of integrations to local payment networks so that you can scan a QR code and pay a PICS or a CBU in Argentina so that you can, QR code payments are very popular across the region, similar to China. And so have all that connection. So it's not just the local stablecoin, but also the connection to all the local infrastructure 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. David Hoffman: [34:40] World 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 wrapped fiat and that's like the center clearing house 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 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 core product. I suppose 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 grand vision here Sebastian Serrano: [35:43] I hope so i hope so and 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, which is truly bankless. David Hoffman: [36:02] What blockchain is this hosted on? Sebastian Serrano: [36:06] So right now we're only supporting EVMs. We're on 10 chains. Ethereum mainnet is the largest on AOM. There is a lot of activity on base, on Celo, on WorkChain. David Hoffman: [36:17] Yeah, I was wondering if Celo would be up there because I know Celo has just punches way above their weight class in terms of just like developing country stablecoin payments. Sebastian Serrano: [36:26] So I think they are the ones that have the, best strategy around local stablecoins and FX. There's a lot of, they're obsessed with that, and I think they punch way about their weight, as you mentioned. Base is also very interested into bringing all local currencies on Chain. World Chain has a lot of users in LATAM, and they integrated deeply our ramps. They have like 6 million active users across the region. So there is a lot of activity and most active addresses are on WorldChain for our stablecoin suite. And they were the first one to integrate. And then we are on Polygon, on ARK. I think stablefx is also going to be very interesting. Launching on Tempo, NOSI. So we're going to try to be everywhere. Liquidity is likely going to, gravitate towards this first four i think but you're. David Hoffman: [37:34] You're leaning into your competency as like a crypto service provider more of a back-end service rather than going direct to consumer Sebastian Serrano: [37:42] Right yeah it's more a b2b to c b2b approach than than a direct retail right hopefully we're everywhere you're deploying. David Hoffman: [37:52] Across all the chains may the best chain win that's not your fight that's BASE's fight that's ARK's fight that's Celo's fight you know the Ethereum Sebastian Serrano: [38:00] Layer 1 let liquidity settle we have we have not deployed outside of Ethereum AVM chains, so no Solana or other chains right now we know a lot it eats like we, we're playing on strengths and we understand Ethereum virtual machine better than any other platform and our team does it so So far, only EVM. David Hoffman: [38:28] 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? Sebastian Serrano: [38:46] 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 are likely not going to like it. Banks already have a lot of pressure on losing the relationship with their clients. And DeFi is going to pay. 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 0.001%, so it's not even in the radar of anyone. I don't think I, so we have not heard of anyone else with the same strategy that we're doing today. So maybe we're pay yearly or pay wrong. But, we're betting all on it. David Hoffman: [40:04] Talk to me about when did this product come out and what are the numbers that you've seen so far? Sebastian Serrano: [40:08] 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. 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. David Hoffman: [41:11] And who's providing liquidity there? Are you guys providing liquidity? Sebastian Serrano: [41:14] Are you kind of just doing that. David Hoffman: [41:16] As a capital investment? Sebastian Serrano: [41:19] 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 going to start having competition. It's like very likely. So people will... David Hoffman: [41:39] 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, Ripio, the company, ends up holding the stablecoin. Sebastian Serrano: [41:55] Yeah. So, you're going to ask a lot more yield to be having that position. So the volumes are going to be going to need to be higher to support the positions. But I think it's still going to, it's the same that happens with the traditional effects. And this is a lot more efficient. So you're going to start seeing a lot of companies migrating to do this because it's going to require less capital. It's going to be faster. And that should justify it. So the market is going to find a price. But yes, people are going to want a lot more than 34%. David Hoffman: [42:49] 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? Sebastian Serrano: [43:07] These are smaller swaps. If we had time, we'll see some dashboards. So today, these are smaller transactions under $200. dollars. So these are small transactions. Sebastian Serrano: [43:26] The model that I think is, so AMMs are not that well suited for FX. So likely we're going to see them grow because AMMs are very good at finding price and FX markets have references. So it's a price discovery is not really the issue. There is all other issues about like exposure and settlement times. Sebastian Serrano: [43:53] There is a lot of other set of issues on FX. Price discovery is not really one of them. So the... 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 one's AMMs are going to be good. But large transactions are going to require order books, like Hyperliquid or like the kind, and RFQ systems like StableFX or Oncelo Textile Protocol. So we're going to need these kind of like works. We're experimenting internally with hooks on Uniswap before so that we can have, 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 going to need some iterations on how the access works. But this is going to come. David Hoffman: [45:10] 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 spider web of liquidity with all of the stable 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? Sebastian Serrano: [45:30] They can go on [ripio.com](https://ripia.com) and they will find all the documentation. It's very well documented for LLMs to integrate it really fast. On platform.repeo, you can get API keys on sandbox directly and cover all the time. And like we already reach like with this set, it's like 95% of the population of Latin America. And then, yeah, from there, find us on Twitter. We'll always be there. Terminally online. David Hoffman: [46:02] Terminally online. Yeah. It's not often that you see 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 spiderweb 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. This, on the other hand, feels like a very cool story. So I hope the best for you guys. Sebastian Serrano: [46:50] Thank you. We're all in on this. We just like. David Hoffman: [46:57] Bankless agent, 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. --- *This article is brought to you by [NEAR](https://www.bankless.com/sponsor/near-1785257427?ref=podcast/tokenizing-latin-america-six-currencies-one-financial-system)*