🌎 The Local Stablecoin Thesis

Real problems. Real solutions. Real data. This is Frontera.

Your weekly dose of data-driven crypto insights from the Latin American frontier. If you’re building, investing, or scaling in LatAm, this is where you start.

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This Edition is Presented by Bitso’s Stablecoin Conference

Frontera is an official media partner of Bitso’s Stablecoin Conference 2025.

We’ll be on the ground in Mexico City this August 27–28, covering the builders, the breakthroughs, and ideas reshaping LatAm’s financial future.

Use the code FRONTERA10 for 10% off your ticket here.

🇺🇸 The Stablecoin Dilemma

Latin America is caught between collapsing currencies and rising capital flows. In this contradiction lies an opportunity: a new generation of stablecoins, backed not by dollars, but by local fiat.

Today, dollar-pegged stablecoins dominate crypto adoption across the region. They offer short-term stability, but come at the cost of long-term dependency.

Every transaction priced in dollars, every wallet holding USDC, reinforces a shadow dollarization that disconnects onchain finance from local economies.

Local stablecoins offer a different path. A chance to rewire the financial rails of LatAm, to process remittances without costly FX, to power regional communities without dollar exposure, to build crypto-enabled tools that speak the language of local economies.

In this report, we present the case for local stablecoins: why they matter, what's holding them back and why they might win anyway.

🏘️ Why Local Stablecoins Matter

1. They offer a path beyond dollarization.

Dollar-backed stablecoins reign supreme in Latin America, but deepen reliance on foreign currency. Local stablecoins flip the script. A digital peso or real keeps value in national units, letting onchain finance strengthen local systems, not erode them. For policymakers and builders, it’s a path to innovate without surrendering monetary sovereignty.

2. They make remittances and payments truly local.

Remittances to Latin America hit $163B in 2024, yet much of that is lost to fees and FX spreads. Local stablecoins allow money to move directly in local currency, no conversions, no intermediaries. A Salvadoran worker can send a digital Colón that lands, and is ready to spend instantly. And because they integrate with systems like SPEI (🇲🇽) or PIX (🇧🇷), they plug crypto into the real economy.

3. They unlock DeFi in local terms.

DeFi today is dollar-based, but USD lending and saving exposes users to FX risk. A peso-pegged stablecoin lets a farmer borrow in the same currency they earn. A Colombian fintech can issue DeFi loans in COP. It’s finance tailored to real economies. By adding local liquidity onchain, these stablecoins create the foundations for regional FX markets and yield products to flourish.

📍 Actual Market Cap and Landscape

The global stablecoin market is massive. Latin America’s local stablecoins are barely a speck of it today. As of June 5 2025, the total stablecoin market capitalization stands at approximately $250B.

However, the vast majority of that is in USD-pegged tokens. And when I say vast majority, I mean it. Only 0.29% of the market cap comes from non-dollar stablecoins. Of that sliver, just $8.4M is tied to Latin American stablecoins, or 0.003%.

Here’s a snapshot of the local stablecoin landscape as it stands today: