Ripio, one of Argentina’s oldest exchanges, is betting that local currency stablecoins and tokenised bonds will lead to a decade-long boom in tokenised money across Latin America.
As CEO Sebastián Serrano gets ready for what he thinks will be a “lateralised” or “down year” for crypto in 2026, Argentine exchange Ripio is focussing on local currency stablecoins and tokenised bonds. He also thinks that stablecoins will have a decade-long boom.
Ripio started off as a retail exchange in 2013, but now it is a B2B infrastructure provider for banks, fintechs, and large platforms like Mercado Libre, which is Latin America’s answer to Amazon.
From retail exchange to regional infrastructure provider
The exchange now has its own dollar stablecoin, Criptodólar (UXD), as well as a new set of local fiat-backed stablecoins. These include the Argentine peso-pegged wARS, the Brazilian real-pegged wBRL, the Mexican peso-pegged wMXN, and a tokenised version of Argentina’s most-traded sovereign bond, AL30. Serrano says that AL30 traded “more than a million units” on the Sunday of the last Argentinian election in October 2025.
Ripio’s local stablecoins are now live on the Ethereum mainnet, Base, and World Chain. World App has integrated the most so far, with around $200,000 in transaction activity for wARS in its first month, December 2025, and about $160,000 so far in January.
Fixing user experience and onboarding friction
First traction is “very promising,” but the aim for Ripio’s local currency stablecoins is at least $100 million in AUM by the end of the year.
Serrano thinks that non-custodial wallets have a “crappy” user experience (UX) since they make users go through laborious “buy” flows and lose money right away when they convert their stablecoins into dollars. This concept pairs local stablecoins with virtual local bank accounts to solve this.
Ripio wants to make the initial step as easy as possible by letting consumers change local currency one-to-one into local stablecoins without having to pay a fee up front.
Local stablecoins will be very important for decentralised finance (DeFi) lending in places like Argentina and Brazil in the long run. This is because it doesn’t make sense for people who work in these countries to borrow money in US dollars.
Most DeFi protocols “force you to borrow in USDC or USDT,” which means that borrowers whose income is in pesos or reais are at risk of losing value soon.
He also noted that “most of the economy is denominated in the local currency,” and that borrowing should follow suit. He said that local stablecoins are the missing “building block” for that change.
Navigating politics, regulation, and market structure
Ripio’s plan works in a country that is going through a lot of changes. Serrano claims that President Javier Milei is doing “great on the macro economy,” but he also argues that Milei’s “tunnel vision” makes it hard for him to see crypto, even though it is similar to libertarianism.
Serrano argues that instead of competing with every retail app, from Binance for trading to Lemon’s Bitcoin-collateralised card, Ripio focused on B2B so it could be “the provider” behind many platforms instead of fighting with them all.
He added that stablecoins would have the stage in 2025 since they will process roughly $33 trillion onchain. “It’s going to be the decade of stablecoins.”