A freelancer in Buenos Aires takes her wages in a stablecoin before the peso slips again. An importer in São Paulo settles over a weekend, when the banks are shut. A street-food vendor in Caracas prices empanadas in bolívares but keeps his savings in digital dollars on his phone. A flower exporter in Bogotá pays its Ecuadorian fertilizer supplier in tokens as part of the standard monthly transfer.
Across Latin America, paying in digital dollars is no longer exotic. The everyday question was answered years ago: ordinary people already use them daily. The new debate, however, is whether their banks can keep up – and the region's own institutions just admitted they're struggling.
According to a June survey by digital asset infrastructure platform Fireblocks covering more than 600 senior decision-makers at financial institutions worldwide, 88% of banks have already committed part of their budgets to digital-asset infrastructure for 2026. But only 16% have anything in production.
Latin America is leaning in harder than most. Some 41% of the region's institutions had made financial commitments prior to 2026. Half plan to spend $1 million or more through the end of the year, and three-in-four deem remaking their financial infrastructure a core investment motive, the highest for any region.
In Argentina, the early-mover figure hit 58%, and the reason behind it is easy to see. In April, Tether led a $14 million round in Belo, a Buenos Aires payments app that runs on stablecoin rails; Mercado Pago, the country's dominant wallet at more than 78 million monthly users, has folded crypto in; and local players like Lemon and Ripio keep bolting bank-style features onto what began as exchanges.
Then comes the catch: 50% of those same institutions are still stuck in pilots, and just 14% have reached production.
Demand was never the problem
Over 70% of Latin Americans are unbanked or underbanked, according to the World Economic Forum – and they built a workaround. Chainalysis's Geography of Cryptocurrency report, counted nearly $1.5 trillion in crypto value received across the region between mid-2022 and mid-2025. In Brazil alone, more than 90% of those flows now run through stablecoins.
Regulators have moved fast in reaction to this new paradigm: El Salvador followed its fizzled Bitcoin experiment with a licensing regime and a dedicated digital-asset commission; Brazil already enforces governance and asset-segregation rules for crypto firms; and a June playbook from BCG and Anchorage Digital calls regulatory clarity one of four tipping points carrying the industry from experimentation to scale.
What is stuck, then, is not the money. Nor the rules.
The holdup is plumbing
Fireblocks found the top obstacle within Latin American institutions is governance – custody, controls, sign-off – cited by 47% as a blocker, and by 71% in Mexico. Asked what would speed things up, firms named institutional-grade infrastructure first.
"The principal bottleneck for Latin America today is infrastructure," said Nicolás Galarza, founder and chief executive of Wealth2B, while speaking to The Latin Times. Wealth2B builds the back-end systems banks use to embed investment products.
Adoption exists, and regulation is arriving, he argued. But between a workable rule and a real product sits "a critical layer: the infrastructure that lets you operate, integrate, custody, comply, and scale."
Capital is betting on exactly that. In November, stablecoin giant Tether invested in the Brazilian custody platform Parfin to push institutional settlement across the region; KuCoin Pay plugged into Brazil's Pix network; Nubank and Itaú have moved in.
Meanwhile in Colombia, Grupo Cibest, formerly Grupo Bancolombia, is spearheading Wenia, their digital assets subsidiary. And in Argentina, Nexo bought the country's Buenbit and signed on as a digital-asset partner of the national team ahead of the FIFA World Cup.
What they build on is the next fight. Most everyday tokens are dollar-pegged and issued abroad – a dependence Ripio chief executive Sebastián Serrano, writing for the World Economic Forum in February, warned carries a strategic cost, for which he encouraged stablecoins backed by local currencies instead.
For a decade, Latin America's crypto story was written by its users. The next chapter belongs to its banks – if they can get the plumbing to hold.
