If you live or operate in Latin America, inflation and currency instability are not theoretical problems—they shape how you save, how you pay, and how you plan.

In countries like Argentina, Venezuela, and Bolivia, trying to preserve value in local currency can feel like a race you’re always losing. Prices move faster than salaries, exchange rates gap overnight, and capital controls make it hard or impossible to legally access U.S. dollars at a fair rate. Against that backdrop, it’s not surprising that people and businesses have started looking for tools that live outside the traditional banking system—but still behave in a way they can trust.

Over the past few years, stablecoins have quietly become one of the most important of those tools.

They’re not just being used by traders. They’re being used by workers, merchants, freelancers, exporters, and families. And nowhere is that shift more visible than in Latin America.

A Region Looking for Stability

Recent data gives a good sense of the scale.

A 2025 report from Argentinian firm Lemon found that Latin America received more than $730 billion in cryptocurrency transaction volume in a single year, up about 60% from the prior year and accounting for roughly 10% of global crypto activity. Critically, this growth wasn’t just fueled by speculative booms. Monthly active crypto app users in the region grew around 18% year over year, roughly three times faster than in the U.S.

Brazil dominates by sheer volume, with over $300 billion in crypto value flowing through the country and growth near 250% year on year. That’s largely driven by institutional trading and a regulatory climate that’s more open to digital assets inside established financial institutions.

Argentina, by contrast, tells a different story. Even as official inflation figures eased somewhat in 2025, crypto adoption kept climbing. According to Lemon, average monthly users of crypto apps were four times higher than during the height of the 2021 bull market. One of the key drivers is cross‑border payments: Argentine fintechs have linked crypto rails to Brazil’s PIX instant payment system, letting Argentines pay Brazilian merchants in pesos while stablecoins like USDT handle the settlement layer in the background. Behind the scenes, these are “digital dollars” doing the work.

Peru has emerged as another important case. Interoperability rules allowed banks and digital wallets to connect, and providers integrated payments into popular apps like Yape and Plin. Transfers between banks and wallets surpassed 540 million in 2025, up about 120% year over year. That kind of growth shows that once the right rails are in place, users adopt digital value transfer quickly.

Across the region, one pattern stands out: people are increasingly using stablecoins as a way to access and move dollars.

The Premium People Will Pay to Escape Bad Money

The Orbital Stablecoin Premium/Discount Index puts some numbers on something many in the region already feel intuitively.

In places where local currencies and FX regimes have broken down, people are willing to pay a meaningful premium to buy dollar‑pegged stablecoins.

In Bolivia, that premium is reported at more than 70% above the “official” rate. In Venezuela, it’s over 40%. At a regional level, Latin America shows an average buy premium of around 7.6%, pushed upward by economies under severe stress.

Those premiums are not a sign of people chasing upside. They’re the cost of accessing a unit of value they believe won’t evaporate between paydays. In that context, stablecoins are acting less like an investment and more like a parallel currency—a digital version of dollarization that operates outside the constraints of local banking systems.

When people are willing to pay that kind of markup to get into digital dollars, it’s a blunt signal: the traditional system is no longer meeting basic needs around store of value and access to foreign currency.

Who’s Really Using Stablecoins?

The stereotype of “crypto” as something dominated by traders and institutions doesn’t match what’s happening in emerging markets.

On BNB Chain, which processes roughly 40% of global stablecoin transfers by count, 82% of transactions are under $1,000 and 99% are under $10,000. The average fee is just a few cents. In other words, the typical stablecoin transaction is small, frequent, and cost‑sensitive.

That usage looks a lot like remittances, small business payments, cross‑border wages, and online commerce, not speculative trading. Venturebloxx reported that stablecoin flows in Latin America increased nine‑fold between 2021 and 2024, reaching around $27 billion. Much of that growth is in these everyday, practical flows.

In Argentina, users are leveraging stablecoins as a bridge between pesos and PIX. In Venezuela, they are a lifeline in an economy where the local currency has lost most of its function. In Peru, integrations between crypto payment tools and mainstream wallets have given millions of users a smooth way into digital finance without them ever consciously “doing crypto.”

The user base is broadening, and the use cases are becoming more grounded.

How Stablecoins Help Businesses Cope with Volatility

For businesses, especially those that buy, sell, or pay across borders, stablecoins solve a few concrete problems.

First, they provide a straightforward way to hold value in a currency that behaves more predictably than many local alternatives. A dollar‑pegged stablecoin is designed to track USD, and in most cases, it’s backed by reserves in cash or short‑term treasuries. Holding part of your treasury or working capital in stablecoins means your planning happens in a unit less affected by local inflation and FX swings.

Second, stablecoins dramatically shorten settlement times. Traditional cross‑border bank transfers can take days and often pass through several intermediaries. Each hop is a chance for a delay, fee, or additional compliance check. Stablecoin transfers, by contrast, move on shared ledgers that settle in seconds or minutes and operate 24/7. That removes a lot of timing risk from international payments.

Third, they make smaller, more frequent cross‑border transactions viable. When sending $40 to a neighboring country through a traditional fintech costs $8 in fees, the model breaks down. When the same $40 can be sent for a few cents using stablecoin rails, new patterns of commerce become economically feasible.

Finally, with the right infrastructure, all of this can be done without changing how your finance team works day to day. Stablecoins can sit under the hood as a settlement mechanism, while your team continues to think in local currency and use familiar systems.

The Compliance Question

None of this works at scale without serious attention to compliance.

Payment professionals with a background in traditional finance emphasize that stablecoin rails, when used correctly, should meet or exceed existing standards. That means applying robust KYC/KYB at onboarding, building financial profiles of counterparties, and continuously monitoring behavior for anomalies. It also means designing systems that can cope with messy real‑world data environments—like countries where standardized addresses don’t exist, but digital identity via phone numbers or messaging apps is ubiquitous.

There is a real risk when too many layers sit between the ultimate end user and the compliance function. Every additional intermediary makes it harder to understand who is actually transacting and why. Good stablecoin infrastructure has to avoid that trap: it needs to keep visibility on the user while still abstracting technical complexity away from them.

Regulators are catching up as well. The U.S. GENIUS Act, passed in 2025, established a federal framework for stablecoin issuance. Major payment networks like Visa and Worldpay, and fintech platforms like Stripe and Revolut, are integrating stablecoin support into their stacks. The direction of travel is toward bringing these tools into the formal system—not ignoring them or pushing them underground.

How alfred Fits Into This Landscape

For businesses in Latin America, the challenge isn’t seeing the appeal of stablecoins. It’s figuring out how to use them safely and effectively.

Most finance teams do not want to:

• Manage crypto wallets or private keys
• Worry about which blockchain to use
• Build their own compliance and monitoring for on‑chain transfers

alfred exists to bridge that gap.

We focus specifically on Latin America and the realities of doing business here: inflation, capital controls, different rail systems like PIX and SPEI, and a patchwork of regulatory frameworks. Our role is to connect traditional banking and local payment methods with stablecoin rails in a way that feels familiar to your team and reliable to your regulators.

In practical terms, that means your business can:

• Hold part of its working capital in digital dollars without maintaining a foreign bank account
• Settle cross‑border invoices and payouts in seconds instead of days
• Reduce exposure to sudden FX moves while money is “on the way”
• Plug into this new layer of digital finance through APIs and workflows that match your existing systems

All of the blockchain complexity—network selection, custody, transaction routing—lives underneath the surface.

Should You Be Paying Attention Now?

If your business is exposed to inflation and currency volatility in Latin America, or if cross‑border payments are a major part of your operations, it’s no longer a question of if stablecoins will affect you. They already are.

Workers, merchants, and customers across the region are adopting them for practical reasons: to protect value, to receive payments, to move money across borders when traditional options are too slow, too expensive, or too restrictive.

The open question for many companies is whether they’ll adapt early, with the right partners and guardrails, or whether they’ll be forced to catch up later under more pressure.

If you’re exploring how stablecoins in Latin America could help your business deal with inflation, currency volatility, and cross‑border friction, alfred can help you do it in a way that is integrated, compliant, and operationally simple.

The tools are here. The behavior is changing. The question now is how you want to plug in.