Ripio CEO Bets on Local Stablecoins in Latin America

Argentine exchange Ripio is leaning into local currency stablecoins and tokenized bonds as CEO Sebastián Serrano braces for what he expects to be a “lateralized” or down year for crypto in 2026 — but a decade-long boom for stablecoins. 

Founded in 2013, Ripio has shifted from a pure retail exchange into a B2B infrastructure provider serving banks, fintechs, and big platforms like Mercado Libre (Latin America’s answer to Amazon). 

The exchange now offers its own dollar stablecoin, Criptodólar (UXD), and a new range of local fiat-backed stablecoins, including the Argentine peso‑pegged wARS, the Brazilian real-pegged wBRL, the Mexican peso-pegged wMXN and a tokenized version of Argentina’s most‑traded sovereign bond, AL30, which Serrano says traded “more than a million units” on the Sunday of the last Argentinian election in October, 2025.

​“The most liquid assets [like sovereign debt] are going to be the ones that get tokenized first,” he told Cointelegraph, adding that tokenizing the dollar was only the first step to bringing more of the real economy onchain, from horses to real estate.

Fixing stablecoin UX

Ripio’s local stablecoins are live on the Ethereum mainnet, Base, and World Chain, with World App integrating most deeply so far, with roughly $200,000 in transaction volume for wARS in its launch month, December 2025, and about $160,000 so far in January.

Serrano calls the initial traction “very promising,” but concedes that the goal for Ripio’s local currency stablecoins is “at least $100 million in AUM by the end of the year.”

This model of pairing local stablecoins with virtual local bank accounts is designed to fix what Serrano sees as a “crappy” user experience (UX) in non‑custodial wallets that forces users into clunky “buy” flows and immediate foreign exchange (FX) losses when converting into dollar stablecoins. 

By enabling users to convert local currency one‑to‑one into local stablecoins, Ripio aims to make the first step as simple as possible, without an upfront FX hit.

Related: Stablecoins will remain ‘indispensable’ in Argentina under new president — Ripio CEO

Local stablecoins for local debt

​Longer term, Serrano sees local stablecoins as critical for decentralized finance (DeFi) lending in countries like Argentina and Brazil, where it makes little sense for locally salaried workers to borrow in US dollars. 

Most DeFi protocols, he notes, “force you to borrow in USDC or USDT,” creating FX risk for borrowers whose income is in pesos or reais, which can lose value quickly. 

Moreover, “most of the economy is denominated in the local currency,” he said, arguing that borrowing should follow suit and that local stablecoins are the missing “building block” for that shift.

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The decade belongs to stablecoins

Ripio’s strategy plays out against a turbulent domestic backdrop. While Serrano credits President Javier Milei with doing “great on the macro economy,” he says his “tunnel vision” leaves little space for crypto despite the ideological overlap with libertarianism. 

On Coinbase’s recent decision to pause peso fiat rails, he points out that “financial services have a lot of localization,” and that, as regulation advances, it may not have made “economical sense” to maintain local operations, given licensing and compliance costs.

​​Rather than go head‑to‑head with every retail app, from Binance on trading to Lemon’s Bitcoin‑collateralized card, Serrano says Ripio leaned into B2B so it could be “the provider” behind multiple platforms instead of competing with them all. 

With stablecoins reportedly processing about $33 trillion onchain in 2025, he said the stage belongs to them. “It’s going to be the decade of stablecoins.”