Tokenizing Latin America: Six Currencies, One Financial System | Sebastian Serrano

Host: 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. 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, is like the Coinbase of Latin America. Not the perfect comparison, but close enough. It has on-ramps, it's an exchange, it does payments, and it also powers a lot of the crypto-enabled backend for the rest of Latin American fintech institutions.

Host: 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 they've tokenized themselves to create a single financial layer for LATAM. 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 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. Ripio is using its position in the market to connect hundreds of local payment systems in each respective country to blockchain-based finance on Ethereum, Zello, WorldChain, and a few other EVMs as well. A pretty bankless story, if you ask me. With that context out of the way, let's go hear from Sebastian from Ripio.

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Host: 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: Thank you. I'm a fan of the board. It's an honor. Finally, after 13 years in crypto, I finally make it to Bankless.

Host: It has been a long time coming. You and I met two years ago at Alif, which was the crypto pop-up city that happened in Buenos Aires. But you have been operating crypto since before I was an adult. Forever. Maybe you can teach us something about where Latin America is with regards to crypto. Bankless listeners will know that Argentina adopted stablecoins far ahead of the curve. Argentina has plenty of crypto developers simply because of hyperinflation and capital controls. I think most people know this story. But how has it evolved since then in 2026? How has crypto been adopted in Latin America? What's been the story in the last two years?

Sebastian Serrano: Crypto, especially in Argentina and across LATAM, is one of the regions that started adopting it early. High inflation and weak institutions have led people to find alternatives. I got into crypto in 2012. I didn't understand what Bitcoin was. I was using it because I had a software development company working with people in the U.S., and it was hard to pay my developers back in Argentina. I found a solution: Bitcoin. I started using it. I didn't even know there were 21 million Bitcoins. I started learning and paying in Bitcoin in 2012, initially on forums, and that led to building a company.

Sebastian Serrano: You love Patagonia. Most of the roads in Patagonia are made of ripio. I grew up in Patagonia, so the metaphor of the company is to build roads to access crypto. That has evolved from there. There is a lot of adoption, but the level of sophistication is deeper. Especially in Argentina and Venezuela, people understand the technology more deeply, and we see the most complex use cases with a lot of integration into the economy. In other countries, you don't see that profundity.

Sebastian Serrano: I have a friend, for example, who went to a dealership to buy a car. They wanted payment in cash. He said, "Well, I don't have cash." They said, "Will you take USDT?" The dealership said yes, obviously. He had a Trust Wallet and accepted the USDT to reserve the car he was buying. The use cases are deeper. One thing that is different from other countries is that you see a lot of savings in stablecoins. There is less speculation because people are actually trying to protect themselves. Crypto around the world is more about speculation and seeking opportunity. In countries like Argentina, people are actually trying to find a safe haven. Crypto has been that for a lot of people.

Host: There are all these different fiat currencies across Latin America. Is the user behavior of foreign exchange, just having to trade currencies, more common in Latin America than inside the United States simply because that's what the economy demands down there?

Sebastian Serrano: It is more common in several countries, but not all of them. Every country in Latin America has its own unique economies and needs. For example, in Argentina, Venezuela, and Bolivia, there is a lot of need for FX and protecting savings. People know at every moment how much the exchange rate is between pesos and dollars. They know it by memory. Not so much in Brazil. In Brazil, the real has been strong for many years. Argentines think and denominate in the dollar, whereas Brazilians denominate in the real. Many Brazilians don't know the exchange rate. It has been so stable that they will just say five: one dollar, five reals. It has been around that for a long time.

Sebastian Serrano: Actually, one of the bonds in Brazil pays really well, between 13% to 15%. There is a large carry trade that can be done with Brazilian reals, which pays you 13% to 15% annually, and the exchange rate has been very stable for the last decade. A lot of people do carry trade with reals. We recently started issuing local currencies for all Latin American countries. We did Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, and Peru. We are seeing a lot of Argentinians buying WBRL, our Brazilian local stablecoin, to do carry trade from Argentina. That is something that is understood across Latam: the real is strong. It is very common in almost every country to know the exchange rate, use your currency during the month, and at the end of the month, whatever is left, you tend to buy dollars to save. It's a very common behavior.

Host: Something you just said is that you guys tokenized a bunch of local currencies in Latin America: the Argentine peso, the Brazilian real, six different local fiat currencies. That's not a small deal. Tokenizing a bunch of nation state fiat currencies 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 crash course on Ripio. It's one of the largest fintechs in Latin America, especially regarding crypto. But I bet anyone outside of Latin America needs an introduction. Talk to me about Ripio, what you guys do, and what your position is in the market down in Latin America.

Sebastian Serrano: 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, and Uruguay. We have a money transmission license in the U.S. As with everything in crypto, we started very retail with wallet exchange. Around 2020 and 2021, we thought everybody is going to integrate crypto, and it's going to be everywhere. We thought our role was better to be a B2B partner, a crypto-as-a-service provider, to enable banks, fintechs, and e-commerce to integrate crypto. That has grown a lot. B2B has been the focus for the last five years.

Host: I want to pause you right here. Is this parallel to Coinbase's arc? Coinbase started as a wallet and an exchange, and now they are trying to be a white-labeling service in the backend of North American brokerages. Charles Schwab or the Boomer brokerages that are too slow to build their own exchange just plug into Coinbase. Is it fair to say that the first part of Ripio's life is speed running the Coinbase playbook?

Sebastian Serrano: Something like that. That has grown a lot. We are the crypto service provider of Mercado Libre. Mercado Libre is like the Amazon of Latin America. It's Amazon and Stripe together. The e-commerce is extremely large; they are the largest e-commerce in the region. They also have a fintech called Mercado Pago, the largest fintech. In that fintech, we are the backend of the crypto offering. We do the buy, hold, and sell of most of their tokens. We also helped them launch their own token for their loyalty program. It is very large. We have 35 million users in B2B2C because of the size of MercadoLibre. Because the loyalty program runs in crypto, we do 100 to 200 transactions per second on the platform. Almost every stockbroker in Argentina that offers crypto does it with our infrastructure. The B2B offering is quite large.

Sebastian Serrano: We have local entities, PSP licenses, bus licenses across the region, and banking relationships across all these countries. That is what allows us—I feel like we have been working a decade into building all this plumbing—to be able to offer and tokenize all of these stablecoins, which I think is a key piece of infrastructure for the next phase of crypto.

Host: It has not been a simple ride. During the stablecoin boom about a year ago, when Circle was going public, there was a big VC stablecoin push. 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 stablecoins. Everyone was learning about how to invest in the stablecoin stack. One thing that was painfully obvious was that there were two classes of companies. There were a lot of companies trying to aggregate a bunch of banking APIs. They would open accounts with a bunch of banks, aggregate all the APIs, and try to raise VC funding based on the value of that aggregation. It became very quickly much more obvious that the actual value was in crypto fintech startups that actually had the licenses and went down into the nation state apparatus of that respective economy, got the regulatory licenses, and got approval to do the hard things like true banking and true exchange.

Host: You just said that you have been through all of these companies and have all the licenses and 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: One of the things is being able to connect to the real-time payment networks. LATAM actually has some of the best fintechs in the region and in the world. The banking infrastructure is actually quite good. The currencies are weak because of all the abuse the governments have done to them, but you have Pix in Brazil, CBU in Argentina, Breve, and 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 as banking transfers and as payment infrastructure. You can scan a QR code and make a payment. This has grown so that Pix payments are larger than card payments in Brazil, because of how much more adapted this got.

Sebastian Serrano: Being able to have all this local infrastructure—BINs, PSPs—and have connections to all these banking rails allows us not only to issue the stablecoins but also to connect them to the local infrastructure. There is a lot of stablecoin issuance and a ton of people going after this opportunity, but almost everybody is going after dollar-denominated stablecoins. We are not issuing a dollar-denominated stablecoin. We are issuing local stablecoins. If you asked me three years ago, I would have said there is not going to be demand for local currencies, for local stablecoins. People don't buy local stablecoins. The dollar has demand because people are saving dollars. They want to buy the asset to protect themselves. Why would they buy a local stablecoin? The reality is they are 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.

Sebastian Serrano: We started to see the need for this from an integration perspective. For the last five years, we have been working with banks, fintechs, and e-commerce. Two years ago, we said we should start working with crypto companies. We should use all this infrastructure to help non-custodial wallets and crypto protocols use our infrastructure or ramps to get service and grow across Latin America. We started working with one non-custodial wallet. We built ramps for them so they could launch in Argentina. They did it. Immediately after, we saw this is awful. The conversion rates are bad. The retention is horrendous. To us, it was like that because we know how it should look. We saw the other side, how a fintech or a neobank would convert. We looked at this non-custodial wallet, and it was horrendous.

Sebastian Serrano: We started digging into what was happening with this non-custodial wallet from a very large company with a decent team. We realized 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, or Mercado Pago, the first call to action is deposit. The button is even in a different color. You open Metamask, Trust Wallet, Coinbase Wallet, WorldApp, or whatever—every non-custodial wallet today, the call to action is buy. You click buy, and there are a bunch of on-ramps that appear. You click that. You have to go into an onboarding that takes five to ten minutes. You do that. Let's say you are a Brazilian. At the end of that five to ten minutes of onboarding, you finally see a Pix ID. You send a thousand reals, and you end up buying ETH, USDC, or USDT. You now have 950 in ETH. Your first experience using crypto is losing money.

Host: 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 ten chance that I get it correct. 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: Yes, you pay a fee and a spread, and then you pay a fee and a spread. You want to go back, you pay again. You end up with $900. How do we fix that? We started to think we need to fix this. First, we need to make the onboarding one-to-one. The user has to pay zero fees on the onboarding. Then we need to make it a deposit on chain. It has to be the local representation. The user can go and click deposit, do the onboarding, get the Pix ID, send a thousand reals, and they have to get a thousand reals on chain. That is why we said we need to 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. That way, the user can have an unparalleled experience with a fintech. It is the same experience they have on Nubank, Mercado Pago, or Revolut: deposit, send a thousand reals, have a thousand reals; send a thousand pesos, have a thousand pesos.

Sebastian Serrano: That was the initial trigger. When we launched it, we immediately saw really good conversion rates. It is growing really fast. AUM is growing 30% month over month. We also started to see all these other use cases. If you look at DeFi, it is all backwards. In emerging markets, people save in dollars. You go into Morpho or Aave, you put Bitcoin or ETH as collateral, and you borrow dollars. But in emerging markets, people save in dollars. They should use that as collateral. They are trying to be defensive with their capital rather than speculative. They should put USDC or USDT as collateral and borrow local currency. To be able to borrow local currency from a DeFi protocol, we need the representation of the local currency on chain. That is why we also need these local stablecoins on chain so that we can flip this and be useful for people in emerging markets.

Sebastian Serrano: Another use case that I think is going to be extremely useful, but people working on local stablecoins are only looking at this, is FX on chain. I think it is going to be big, but it is not going to be the only use case. It is going to be one of them. Crypto is built for trading. We are trading meme coins for other meme coins. It is already better for small transactions than the traditional system. If you go to Wise and try to send a thousand reals to Argentina, you are going to get 285,000 pesos. If you do it on Uniswap with WBRL to WRS, you are going to get 315. That is a 10% difference on Uniswap today. That is also because these are two little volatile currencies. A traditional remittance company will have to send a wire to the U.S. and then wire back into the destination. From Argentina to Brazil, these are two currencies that are hard to have in treasury. You would have to have stocks in each of these countries. But these are neighbor countries. Blockchain is going to be just better, and it is going to grow. It is likely one of the things that is going to take off first.

Sebastian Serrano: Anything that you want to localize is going to require local stablecoins. Let's say you want to localize Polymarkets. It is growing a lot across the world. It is one of the biggest use cases of crypto today: prediction markets. If you want to build a prediction market for Boca vs. River, which are the two largest football teams in Argentina—stadios on fire—every time they play the Superclásico, this is very important and unique to Argentina. 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. The vaults, the holes, and the assets for that prediction market should have local currency in it. The way to do that on chain is to have a local stablecoin. We got extremely bullish about all this. We are basically putting all our efforts right now into this product, which has the local stablecoin, ramps that are one-to-one, on-chain liquidity so that you can go in and out and trade it to dollar stablecoins, and building all that infrastructure with one API for all of them. We are extremely bullish about that.

[Sponsor Break: Zcash]

Host: Dollar stablecoins taught Latin America how to store value on chain. Ripio is taking that same idea and bringing it to the currencies people actually use every day. With Wrapped Fiat, Ripio is putting more than a decade of experience powering crypto infrastructure for leading companies across Latin America behind a suite of six local currency stablecoins covering Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, Chile, and Peru. Each is pegged one-to-one to its local currency and fully backed by reserves held in regulated financial institutions with independent attestations published for each token. Wrapped Fiat is not just designed to sit there; it is built to move. The suite is live across 10 EVM chains with liquidity and integrations already spanning platforms like Morpho, Uniswap, and Chainlink. Users can move between local payment rails like Pix and Spei and matching wrapped fiat one-to-one in real time with zero fees on both on-ramps and off-ramps and no FX conversion. Local rails in, on-chain in the middle. For builders, Ripio offers APIs, webhooks, widgets, and a sandbox from day one. Start building with Wrapped Fiat today at platform.rippio.com.

[End Sponsor Break]

Host: I want to back up a little bit and go back to the on-ramp piece. There is that idea that the thing that really fueled the growth of the internet was ads. Ads, as opposed to microtransactions. Watching an ad for a few seconds was the microtransaction that paid for user-generated content that created the internet as we know it today. I think you can take that same analogy forward to what paid for the growth of crypto. That was large centralized exchanges subsidizing the cost of on-ramps. On-ramps in crypto are a terrible business model. A lot of the startups that have been on-ramp only have not really gone very well. As it turns out, the centralized exchanges—the Coinbases, the Krakens—I am 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. They build the on-ramp because that is what they need to get the capital on-ramp. The fraud costs that Coinbase has to deal with...

Sebastian Serrano: It is true for every fintech. It is not just for crypto. If you look at Nubank or any neobank, they subsidize a lot of the going into the app, and they make their money from another thing. For example, in Nubank, it is credit. The credit card is the profit-generating piece of the fintech. This is not just in crypto. It is in every financial service. You try to make the on-ramp very frictionless and at a cost. Then you need to build some other business model where you are going to find the profits to justify making it the most frictionless possible.

Host: You have coined the Argentine peso, the Brazilian real, the Colombian local currency—six different local currencies. The business model that Ripio holds here is like a stablecoin issuer. It is like a money market fund in the respective countries. You are making them bets with local entities because you have all the licenses and regulatory compliance that enables you to do this. You are a money market fund in all of these six respective different countries. You are making the bet that there is enough payment demand and exchange demand. To your point, no one really wants to buy and hold Argentine peso. That is not a sound financial strategy. But you are making a bet that there is enough payment demand, that the net buyer or net holder of Argentine pesos or Brazilian real is all of these people who need to transact or spend, and the velocity of money going around in the economy will create that.

Sebastian Serrano: Velocity is enormous. We have some Dune dashboards if someone wants to go look at them. The entire supply that we have today is like 15 million. When we launched it in November last year with less than a million, it is growing really fast. The entire supply moves weekly. The velocity is really fast. You can look at the opportunity in two ways. One is the true use cases I was describing. 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.

Sebastian Serrano: A decade ago, we were going to tokenize everything. There was a startup that I know that was tokenizing sneakers. We were thinking through the most illiquid things. What ended up happening is that tokenization is going from the most liquid down the chain to the most liquid. What is the most liquid asset? The U.S. dollar. There are 23 trillion U.S. dollars. 1% of that is tokenized, 1.5%. Treasury thinks it is going to be 10% in a decade. It is going to progress. Now we are seeing an explosion in tokenization of equities, treasuries, and bonds. That has been growing really fast in the last few months. I think the next thing is going to be the tokenization of local currency. It is just the progression of that tokenization from the most liquid, most used asset down into everything. We will end up in everything. Everything will be tokenized, including local currencies or non-USD currencies.

Sebastian Serrano: In terms of size, non-USD currencies are 100 trillion, so it is five times the U.S. Half of that is China. In LATAM, if you just look at Brazil and Mexico, it is 30 trillion, so it is quite substantial. Yields are much higher. Yields of Argentinian pesos are 25% right now. Brazilian reals are 13% to 15%. It is a smaller money supply but larger yields. How much of that gets tokenized? Today it is zero. It is 0.002%. We are going to try to make it 1%.

Host: Can you walk me through a bank-to-bank transfer across some of these countries? Brazil to Argentina, for example, without using crypto or blockchain. How does a payment today go from a Brazilian bank to an Argentine bank?

Sebastian Serrano: It depends. There are different tools to do it. Something very common: there are a lot of Brazilians who send their kids to study in Buenos Aires. It is very common to send Brazilians to study medicine in Buenos Aires. The father sending money is more likely going to use Wise. They are going to do a Pix transfer to Wise, and Wise is going to, next day, do a local transfer through CBU to the bank account on the other side. It usually takes one day. It is likely going to take 10% on the exchange.

Sebastian Serrano: The other way around is actually much more evolved because of Pix on the other side. There are a lot of companies where, from Mercado Pago or almost every fintech, you can scan a QR code in Brazil and pay that Pix in Brazil. In the back, there is likely going to be some crypto involved with a stablecoin sandwich. That is already very, very developed and being integrated into the Argentinian apps. Maybe because the product teams in Argentina are more crypto savvy, they find ways to connect these things. It varies, but Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico have very good payment networks and very good fintechs working in these spaces. Other countries are lagging behind, like Uruguay, Chile, and Peru. They do not have real-time payment networks, but they are all copying Brazil. The first one to launch it was Brazil with Pix, and everybody is launching their own version of Pix across the region. That, together with the understanding of crypto, is all getting intertwined and connected.

Sebastian Serrano: The use of what is called the stablecoin sandwich is very common. More and more fintechs are using stablecoins in the back with the users not knowing it. 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 are using it.

Host: With all of these currencies that you have tokenized—the six currencies—is that a B2B2C product? Is that also a consumer product? Who is that really for? How is that really changing the topology of bank payments across countries?

Host: So we call it a platform. First thing is having a mint account. So being able to mint and redeem these stablecoins locally. We have two go-to-market strategies. One is the crypto service, which is this offering that we already have with many banks and fintechs. So integrating it there. It's already available. YOL, which is the largest stock broker in Argentina, already has WRs integrated. We're making many other integrations like this. So that crypto as a service is kind of like a way to build distribution of crypto on our assets.

Then we have the ramps product. This is the offering of one-to-one ramps so that you can build a very frictionless onboarding into your app. We power WordUp, Coinbase Wallet. We just started to work with Minipay. There's a wallet that's very popular in Brazil called Picnic that is starting to use us. In the last quarter, 10 fintechs and non-custodial wallets started to integrate this product.

Together with that, we have a very strong market stream that provides on-chain liquidity. With that, we are showing the stable effects of Circle. That is a big component of making this useful. And a lot of integrations to local payment networks so that you can scan a QR code and make a Pix or a CBU in Argentina. QR code payments are very popular across the region, similar to China. And they 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. I haven't seen it anywhere else. We're only going to do LATAM, but I think this is something that we need to do across the world.

Host: 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 clearinghouse, if you will, for all of these different trades being made across currencies, all the forex exchanges being made 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 back end. 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, 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: I hope so. I hope so. And that way, people don't have to redeem anymore and transfer money between each other. You can have a very good financial experience without having to need a bank, which is truly bankless.

Host: What blockchain is this hosted on?

Sebastian Serrano: 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.

Host: I was wondering if Celo would be up there because I know Celo punches way above their weight class in terms of developing country stablecoin payments. So I think they're the ones that have the best strategy around local stablecoins and effects. They're obsessed with that. And I figured they punch way above their weight, as you mentioned.

Sebastian Serrano: Base is also very interested in bringing all local currencies on chain. WorkChain has a lot of users in LATAM and they integrated deeply our ramps. They have like six million active users across the region. So there is a lot of activity and most active addresses are on WorkChain for our stablecoin suite. And they were the first one to integrate. And then we are on Polygon, on Arc. I think stable effects 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 leaning into your competency as a crypto service provider, more of a backend service provider, rather than going direct to consumer. It's more B2B2C, B2B2B approach than direct retail. Hopefully we're everywhere supporting everybody. Deploying across all the chains, may the best chain win. That's not your fight. That's Base's fight. That's Arc's fight. That's Celo's fight. Let liquidity settle.

We have not deployed outside of Ethereum AVM chains. So no Solana or other chains right now. We're playing on strengths and we understand Ethereum virtual machine better than any other platform. So far only EVM.

Host: 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: 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 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 it's 0.001%, so it's not even on the radar of anyone. I don't think we have heard of anyone else with the same strategy that we're doing today. So maybe we're early or maybe we're wrong. But we're betting all on it.

Host: Talk to me about when did this product come out and what are the numbers that you've seen so far?

Sebastian Serrano: We launched it in November last year. So it's almost a year. The AUM initially was 800K. Now it's at 15 million. It's growing 30% very stable month over month. We have 46,000 active addresses right now monthly. The velocity is really high. Between 10 and 15 million move every week. 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 was going to start early on, but we see them growing. Last month, it doubled the amount of swaps that we see on Uniswap.

Host: And who's providing liquidity there? Are you guys providing liquidity? You're kind of just doing that as a capital investment?

Sebastian Serrano: Today we are the ones providing liquidity on chain. We are the LPs in all the networks and these pools. But eventually you're going to start having competition. It's very likely.

Host: Is it very profitable to LP between an emerging market stablecoin and the U.S. dollar? I would imagine that as that emerging market stablecoin loses versus the dollar, Ripio ends up holding the stablecoin.

Sebastian Serrano: Yeah. You're going to ask a lot more yield to be having that position. The volumes are going to need to be higher to support the positions. But I think 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. The market is going to find a price. But yes, people are going to want a lot more than 34%.

Host: What's the actual kind of business that's swapping between the Brazilian real and the US dollar on Uniswap? 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: These are smaller swaps. If we had time, we'd see some dashboards. Today these are smaller transactions under $200. So these are small transactions. The model that I think is... 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 price discovery is not really the issue. There are all other issues about exposure and settlement times. Price discovery is not really one of them. 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, these sizes, $200, $1,000. That one AMMs are going to be good. But large transactions are going to require order books, like Hyperliquid or RFQ systems like StableFX or Oncelo or Textile Protocol. So we're going to need this kind of work.

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 are 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 it's going to come.

Host: Sebastian, I think this is pretty cool. I don't think I've seen, as you said, I don't think I've seen this model played out before. The spider web of liquidity with all of the stablecoins 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: They can go on ripio.com and they will find all the documentation. It's very well documented for LLMs to integrate it really fast. On platform.ripio, you can get API keys on sandbox directly and cover all the time. With this set, it's like 95% of the population of Latin America. And then from there, find us on Twitter. We'll always be there. Terminally online.

Host: Terminally online, yeah.

[Discussion continues with promotional segments...]

Host: 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: Thank you. We're all in on this.

Host: We just like... 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.