Compiled by Tim, PANews

PANews Editor's Note: This article is selected from the third part of " The Money Layer: LATAM Crypto 2025 Report ", which is the stablecoin part. It mainly focuses on the development status of local stablecoins in Latin America. The following is a compilation of the content.

Stablecoins have become the backbone of Latin America's on-chain economy. US dollar-denominated and local currency-denominated stablecoins have replaced volatile assets and become the core of crypto applications, maintaining exponential growth.

Key Takeaways:

In July 2025, USDT and USDC accounted for more than 90% of all exchange transfers, a significant increase from approximately 60% in 2022.
Brazil leads in both the number of active local stablecoins and overall trading volume. By July 2025, the Brazilian Real stablecoin's trading volume had reached $906 million, nearly matching the 2024 annual total of $910 million. At current growth rates, annual trading volume is expected to reach approximately $1.5 billion.
The Mexican peso-pegged stablecoin (MXNB + MXNe) will have a total market capitalization of approximately US$34 million in July 2025, representing an approximately 638-fold annual increase from 1 million pesos (approximately US$53,000) in July 2024.
Native stablecoins on leading blockchains: Polygon (BRLA, BRZ), Celo (cREAL), Base (MXNe), and Arbitrum (MXNB)

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Stablecoins have become the financial cornerstone of cryptocurrency adoption in Latin America, with applications far beyond speculation. Across the region, stablecoins serve as savings tools, payment channels, cross-border remittance channels, and inflation hedges, making them the most practical and widely used form of cryptocurrency. Latin America currently leads the world in real-world stablecoin adoption: According to Fireblocks' "2025 State of Stablecoins Report," 71% of respondents use stablecoins for cross-border payments, and 100% of companies have launched, are testing, or are developing stablecoin strategies. Equally important, 92% of respondents reported that their wallets and API infrastructure support stablecoin operations, demonstrating both market demand and technological maturity. For millions of people in Latin America, stablecoins have become a digital equivalent to the US dollar, a readily accessible inflation hedge, and an effective way to circumvent capital controls. In many cases, they are the only viable way for people to hold dollarized assets.

In countries like Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia, stablecoins have surpassed Bitcoin as the preferred cryptoasset for daily use, primarily due to their price stability and direct USD peg ("The State of Stablecoins 2025 Report," Fireblocks). USDC and USDT account for over 90% of exchange transfers. In Argentina, for example, these two stablecoins accounted for 72% of cryptoasset purchases on the Bitso platform in 2024, while Bitcoin accounted for only 8% (Bitso 2024 data). Colombia exhibits a similar pattern, but due to restrictions on US dollar bank accounts and ongoing currency volatility, stablecoins account for 48% of purchases. The shift is even more pronounced in Brazil, where stablecoin trading volume on local exchanges has increased by 207.7% year-over-year, significantly outpacing other cryptoassets (Chainalysis, October 2024). In addition to transfers, 39% of cryptoasset purchases in Latin America in 2024 involved stablecoins, a significant increase from 30% the previous year (Bitso 2024).

Current Status of Local Stablecoin Development

While US dollar-pegged assets remain the dominant form of stablecoins in Latin America (primarily for hedging against inflation), the past two years have seen explosive growth in stablecoins pegged to local currencies. These tokens, pegged to national fiat currencies like the Brazilian real and Mexican peso, are increasingly being used for domestic payments, on-chain commerce, and integration with local financial systems. By eliminating the cumbersome process of exchanging US dollars for fiat currencies, these stablecoins reduce costs for merchants and users while accelerating local trade settlements. For businesses, they offer direct access to payment systems like Brazil's PIX, enabling instant transfers without bank involvement while also meeting fiscal and tax compliance requirements. In highly inflationary economies, these stablecoins also serve as "bridge assets," allowing users to trade in a stable local currency while being able to convert it into US dollars or other stores of value for risk hedging purposes.

Brazil provides the clearest case study of this trend, with stablecoins pegged to the Brazilian real experiencing astonishing year-over-year growth. Transaction activity surged from just over 5,000 in 2021 to over 1.4 million in 2024, and remains at a high of 1.2 million so far in 2025, representing a more than 230-fold increase compared to four years ago. The number of unique senders has also seen exponential growth: from fewer than 800 in 2021 to over 90,000 in 2025, an 11-fold increase since 2023 alone. On-chain native transfer volume has jumped from approximately 110 million reais (approximately $20.9 million at press time) in 2021 to nearly 5 billion reais (approximately $900 million) in July 2025, nearly matching the total for the entire year of 2024. Including data from August so far, the total transfer volume for 2025 has already surpassed that for the entire year of 2024. This innovation, which began as a marginalized experiment, has rapidly grown into the core pillar of Brazil's on-chain economy in just a few years, achieving explosive growth of several times in terms of transaction volume, user base, and transfer value.

As of June 2025, five different stablecoins pegged to the Brazilian Real are in active circulation, reducing market concentration and signaling a mature ecosystem. These include: BRZ, issued by fintech company Transfero, provides blockchain infrastructure solutions for banks and payment institutions in Latin America; cREAL, issued by the Celo public blockchain, focuses on mobile-first DeFi integration; BRLA, developed by BRLA Digital and Avenia, focuses on compliant fiat currencies serving as a bridge to cryptocurrencies; BRL1, backed by a consortium of exchanges including Mercado Bitcoin, Bitso, and Foxbit, aims to establish universal industry standards; and BBRL, developed by the Braza Group, serves regional trade and payment scenarios.

Despite the growth in market size, the Brazilian real stablecoin is still in its early stages of development, with approximately $23 million in circulation.

According to analysis by Iporanga Ventures in its latest Brazilian Real Stablecoin Report, the landscape is rapidly evolving, and while a clear market leader has yet to emerge, a deeper dive into project-level data reveals specific areas of leading advantage.

Among them, the BRLA stablecoin ranks first in the "number of unique remittances" indicator, indicating that it has the widest coverage of retail users.

cREAL dominates in terms of transfer volume, reflecting its early traction in the retail and small-value payments sectors.

In terms of native transaction volume, BRZ maintained a commanding lead until mid-2024, but this position was disrupted by the sudden rise of cREAL in the second half of that year. In early 2025, with the steady growth of BRLA, Celo's lead in transaction volume gradually faded. Then, in July 2025, BBRL made a stunning entrance. Despite its relatively limited number of active sending addresses, its share of native transaction volume soared to approximately 65% in a single month, thanks to the explosive growth triggered by the launch of XRPL (XRP Ledger).

Unlike the US dollar stablecoin, whose issuance and transfer transactions are concentrated on the Ethereum mainnet, the real stablecoin's trading activity is primarily concentrated on Layer 2 networks and other public chains. Polygon has become a dominant channel thanks to its native transaction volume and active user base: in July 2025, it recorded approximately 74,000 transactions (involving 14,000 unique users) and set a record monthly trading volume of 500 million reals (approximately US$50 million).

Celo ranks second and holds the all-time high of 213,000 transactions, a peak achieved in December 2024, driven by the rapid growth of cREAL in early retail scenarios and micropayments. Although the number of unique payers decreased in 2025, the large-scale, recurring payment flows formed by merchants, aggregators, and funding pools maintained a considerable level of Celo transaction volume.

XRPL, a striking emerging player, has experienced explosive growth since the launch of the Brazilian Real stablecoin (BBRL) in July 2025: transfer volume jumped from over 100 in May to approximately 3,000 in July, while native transaction volume soared to approximately 1.16 billion Brazilian reals, marking the formation of a new high-value channel.

The Base chain showed steady growth in 2025, reaching a peak in June. Meanwhile, the BNB chain's market share has continued to decline since 2022, following a sharp decline in transaction volume and active addresses. The Ethereum mainnet only intermittently processes large, low-frequency transactions, making it of limited use. However, the BRZ token briefly dominated transaction activity on the network from late 2023 to early 2024.

Beyond raw data, the Iporanga Ventures report reveals the practical applications and high-value drivers of stablecoins in Brazil: B2B payments lead the market, with businesses using stablecoins to pay overseas suppliers or employees, then utilizing the local PIX system for local settlement. For cross-border fund inflows, US dollars are converted into Brazilian real stablecoins for domestic payments. These stablecoins are becoming critical infrastructure for Brazil's tokenized asset ecosystem, enabling on-chain settlement without bank custody. In the gig economy and small and medium-sized enterprises, stablecoins support wage payments, risk hedging, and capital protection. Merchant integration solutions such as CloudWalk's BRLC and Mercado Pago's USD stablecoin are driving mainstream adoption.

Brazil boasts the most diverse and mature local currency stablecoin ecosystem, while the Mexican peso stablecoin market is evolving around two major projects: Juno, Bitso's MXNB, and Brale's MXNe, each with distinct development trajectories. MXNB's circulation has evolved from sporadic large-scale issuance peaks in late 2024 to a more stable and widespread circulation pattern since 2025.

MXNB's growth in 2025 marks a significant shift toward everyday use. In July 2025, the platform completed 179 transfers involving 70 unique senders, a year-on-year surge of 339% and 290% compared to 46 transfers and 21 senders in the same period last year.

While transaction volume peaked in January 2025, with 14.5 million Mexican pesos (approximately $750,000 at the exchange rate at the time of writing) handled in relatively few transactions, in July of the same year, only 480,000 Mexican pesos (approximately $25,000) were handled, driven by a greater number of small payments. The average transaction value has dropped from approximately 28,700 Mexican pesos in July 2024 to 3,600 Mexican pesos. This shift has been accompanied by a clear migration direction: towards Arbitrum. In 2024, approximately 99% of transactions occurred on Ethereum; however, since the second quarter of 2025, approximately 94% of transactions have shifted to Arbitrum, making low-fee Layer 2 channels the default choice.

MXNe, issued by Brale, has gone the other way and has become the most traded Mexican peso-pegged stablecoin by operating exclusively on the Base chain.

This activity peaked in March 2025, with 3,367 transfers from 274 senders. Although the frequency of subsequent transactions slowed, the total value of transfers continued to rise. In July 2025, 2,148 transfers from 158 senders reached a new high of approximately 637.7 million Mexican pesos. This brought the average transaction size to nearly 297,000 pesos, indicating the possibility of large-scale transactions and institutional operations.

The contrast is stark: MXNB now dominates small-value retail payments, while MXNe focuses on larger settlements. Compared to the more fragmented ecosystem of the Brazilian Real, the Mexican market remains concentrated among these two issuers and a handful of settlement channels. However, this hasn't hindered liquidity growth. Since mid-2025, DEX trading volume for the Mexican peso has rapidly climbed to the top of the charts, signaling a maturing market structure.

DEX liquidity and trading models

The application of stablecoins pegged to the Brazilian Real and the Mexican Peso in Latin America is moving beyond payments, establishing substantial liquidity support on DEXs by forming on-chain foreign exchange channels between local currencies and global stablecoins.

Among BRL-linked assets, cREAL is a core trading hub. Its largest trading pair, CELO-cREAL, has accumulated approximately $126 million in trading volume, supported by the deep liquidity of Celo's native DEX ecosystem. cREAL also anchors major cross-stablecoin markets: cREAL-USDT ($87.7 million), cREAL-cUSD ($59.1 million), as well as non-USD pairs such as cEUR-cREAL ($48.6 million) and cKES-cREAL ($24.9 million). This demonstrates cREAL's dual role as both a gateway to the Brazilian Real and a base currency for multi-currency swaps. However, since reaching a peak monthly trading volume of $80 million in November 2024 (accounting for 85% of total stablecoin trading volume that month), cREAL's monthly DEX trading volume has steadily declined, falling to $5 million by July 2025, returning to the level of July 2024.

BRLA has become a primary USD gateway, with BRLA-USDC ($97.5 million) and BRLA-USDT ($21.3 million) leading the way. Since March 2025, BRLA-USDC has consistently been the most traded USD-denominated DEX pair outside of stablecoins in this dataset (only briefly surpassed by the MXNB pair in May 2025). While BRLA has never reached cREAL's historical peak trading volume, its total trading volume reached $9 million in July 2025, nearly double cREAL's volume during the same period and tripling its own volume from July 2024.

BRZ remains stable and highly integrated, with liquidity primarily distributed across three trading pairs: BRZ-USDC (US$15.1 million), BRZ-USDT (US$14.7 million), and BRZ-BUSD (approximately US$9.1 million). Among Brazilian real stablecoins, BRZ boasts the widest trading pair portfolio. While its trading volume remains lower than that of cREAL and BRLA, it has experienced continuous growth, rising from US$26,000 in July 2024 to US$3 million in July 2025, peaking at US$4.77 million in April of the same year.

In May 2025, during a period of large trades and liquidity influx, trading volume for the Mexican peso-pegged stablecoin MXNB surged in its top trading pairs: MXNB-WAVAX ($29.7 million) and MXNB-USDC ($18.6 million). Since then, strong momentum has persisted for MXNB pairs, with three MXN pairs currently ranking in the top ten by trading volume on local stablecoin DEXs, suggesting this surge was not a temporary blip.

MXNe runs exclusively on Base, with its liquidity concentrated in the MXNe-USDC trading pair (valued at approximately $18.3 million). Its DEX trading volume has steadily increased from $1.13 million in March 2025 to $6.6 million in July, aligning with Base's strategy of integrating native stablecoins into the USD pool. Interestingly, while MXNe leads MXNB in on-chain transaction volume, MXNB boasts a higher DEX trading volume. This suggests that MXNe primarily serves high-value transactions and integrates into the USD ecosystem, while MXNB focuses on active on-chain transactions.

DEX trading volume for BRL1 and BBRL remains low, and cross-currency stablecoin trading activity is also small, with only three trading pairs showing significant activity. Among them, the BRLA-BRZ pair with the largest trading volume peaked at approximately $400,000 in April 2025.

Stablecoin trading volume is highly concentrated on a small number of platforms, each tied to a specific local stablecoin ecosystem. Uniswap maintains its dominant liquidity position with $426 million in total trading volume, occupying a core position in the market for Brazilian Real and Mexican Peso-pegged stablecoins on Ethereum and Layer 2. Each protogenesis-linked DEX maintains a dominant position in its respective stablecoin sector: Trader Joe's ($52.8 million) and PancakeSwap ($13.3 million) dominate the liquidity of BRZ on the Avax and BNB chains, while Mento ($50.8 million) serves as the dedicated trading platform for cREAL on the Celo chain. The 1inch limit order book protocol utilizes a different operating mechanism, positioning itself more like an aggregated settlement layer than a liquidity provider, primarily focused on processing large, one-time swaps rather than maintaining deep liquidity pools.

One of the most notable developments of 2025 was the rise of Aerodrome. The platform has reached $25.8 million in cumulative trading volume, almost entirely driven by MXNet-USDC trades since the second quarter. As the core infrastructure for native stablecoins on Base, Aerodrome's role on the Base chain is similar to Mento's in the Celo ecosystem. Smaller but noteworthy trading venues, such as Carbon DeFi ($4.8 million), Pharaoh ($1.95 million), and Balancer (approximately $1.8 million), serve decentralized or niche cross-asset pools. Overall, the liquidity of on-chain native stablecoins continues to grow in absolute terms and is increasingly deeply integrated with chain-native DEX infrastructure. The rapid rise of Aerodrome is the clearest example of this trend in 2025.

Stablecoin liquidity models remain deeply intertwined with their native chains and mainstream decentralized exchanges (DEXs). Celo ranked first with $363 million in total trading volume, dominated by cREAL-cUSD and USDC trading on the Mento platform. This pair consistently led USD-denominated trading volume from July 2024 to February 2025. Polygon ranked second with $136 million, providing diverse Brazilian real stablecoin liquidity (particularly BRLA and BRZ) through Uniswap and QuickSwap, highlighting its dual functionality in stablecoin transfers and the DeFi and payment ecosystems. Avalanche ranked third with approximately $54.8 million, primarily driven by a surge in MXNB-WAVAX trading on Trader Joe's in May 2025. Uniswap, Pharaoh, and the 1inch limit order book protocol further added liquidity to the Brazilian real and Mexican peso markets. Base followed closely with approximately $26.2 million, with almost all of its liquidity coming from MXNet-USDC transactions on the Aerodrome platform. This trading volume has grown in tandem with Base’s strategy to develop a local stablecoin by 2025.

The key takeaway is clear: local stablecoin liquidity on DEXs is ecosystem-anchored, with each major public chain pairing its mainnet assets with a handful of dominant trading venues. Two explosive growth cases in 2025—Trader Joe's MXNB on the Avalanche chain and Aerodrome's MXNe on Base—vividly demonstrate how, when a local stablecoin assumes strategic importance, the on-chain application ecosystem and exchange dominance mutually reinforce each other.

Besides Brazil and Mexico, several other Latin American countries have also experimented with launching local stablecoins, though most remain in the early stages of development or in limited pilots. In Argentina, extreme currency volatility has hindered sustained traction for peso-pegged tokens like Transfero's ARZ and Num Finance's nARS. Colombia has launched several stablecoin projects, including nCOP (Num Finance), cCOP (Celo/Mento), COPM (Minteo), and COPW (Bancolombia), targeting remittances and domestic payments, but adoption remains limited. Chile's CLPD (Chain Peso) on Base and Peru's nPEN (Num Finance) and sPEN (Anclap, built on the Staller chain) are similarly limited in niche markets, with use cases primarily confined to pilot projects and specific payment corridors. While these projects reflect growing interest in the region, their transaction volumes remain limited, highlighting the critical role of local conditions, particularly monetary stability and regulatory clarity, in driving adoption.

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