Ripio tokenizes six Latin American currencies, hits $15M AUM a year in

Ripio pitches itself as the connective tissue for Latin American crypto finance

Sebastián Serrano, co-founder and CEO of Ripio, described his company as a crypto-as-a-service provider that began as Argentina's first Bitcoin wallet in 2014 and has since built licenses, payment-service-provider status and banking relationships across Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, Peru and Uruguay. He said Ripio powers the crypto backend for Mercado Libre's fintech arm Mercado Pago, serving roughly 35 million users and processing 100 to 200 transactions per second on that platform alone.

Serrano argued that the real value in the stablecoin boom went to companies that secured actual regulatory licenses rather than those simply aggregating banking APIs. "There is a lot of stablecoin issuance and like a ton of people going after this opportunity, but almost everybody is going after dollar-denominated stablecoins," he said, framing Ripio's local-currency approach as a differentiator built on a decade of licensing work.

Why local stablecoins, not just dollar tokens, matter

Serrano said he once doubted there was intrinsic demand for local-currency stablecoins since savers in Argentina and similar countries prefer dollars. But he said usage patterns changed his view: people need local stablecoins to pay bills and fulfil contracts denominated in local currency, even if they don't want to hold them as savings. Ripio launched its six local stablecoins, branded as wrapped fiat, in November last year.

He pointed to a specific cross-border example: sending 1,000 Brazilian reais to Argentina via Wise nets about 285,000 pesos, versus roughly 315,000 pesos trading WBRL to WARS directly on Uniswap, a roughly 10% difference he attributed to blockchain removing the need for Wise-style double-wire routing through the US.

Fixing the self-custody on-ramp problem

Serrano described testing Ripio's infrastructure with a non-custodial wallet partner and finding conversion and retention "horrendous." He said the core issue is that custodial fintech apps like Revolut or Mercado Pago lead with a "deposit" button, while wallets like MetaMask or Trust Wallet lead with "buy," forcing users through a lengthy onboarding before they finally fund an account and lose money to spreads immediately.

"Your first experience using crypto is losing money." — Sebastián Serrano

Ripio's fix, he said, is to make onboarding fee-free and let users deposit local currency on-chain one-to-one, subsidizing the ramp by managing the float, similar in spirit to how Nubank subsidizes onboarding and profits instead from credit products.

Growth numbers and where liquidity concentrates

Serrano gave figures tracking the product's first year: AUM grew from $800,000 at launch to $15 million, growing roughly 30% month over month, with about 46,000 monthly active addresses and weekly transfer volume of $10-15 million or more. He said a third of supply sits in Morpho vaults, and Uniswap swap volume between local stablecoins and dollars has been doubling month over month, though transactions there remain small, mostly under $200.

He said Ethereum mainnet holds the largest share of assets under management, with notable activity on Base, Celo and World Chain, the latter having roughly 6 million active users in the region. Ripio deploys only across EVM chains and has not launched on Solana or other non-EVM networks, betting that liquidity will gravitate toward "these first four" chains, in Serrano's words.

Market structure limits and the AMM-versus-order-book question

Serrano argued that automated market makers are well suited to price discovery but poorly suited to foreign exchange more broadly, since FX price discovery already has clear references; the real friction is settlement and exposure. He expects AMMs to keep capturing smaller transactions (in the $200 to $1,000 range) while larger trades move to request-for-quote systems or order books, citing Celo's Mento protocol and Hyperliquid as examples of the direction he expects the market to take. Ripio is currently the sole liquidity provider on its pools, though Serrano said competition will likely emerge as volumes grow and yield requirements on these positions rise above "3 or 4%."

Who stands to gain or lose, and open questions

Serrano said local regulators and central banks are relatively well aligned with local stablecoins since issuers effectively buy government debt as reserves. He suggested banks are more exposed, since DeFi could out-compete them on deposit rates that today pay close to nothing. He acknowledged uncertainty about how fast this scales: "Today is 0.001% so it's not even in the radar of anyone," he said of tokenization's current share of non-dollar currency supply, while also saying he was unaware of any other company pursuing the same multi-currency strategy, adding "maybe we're very early or very wrong."

The conversation did not resolve how large cross-border FX volumes could become relative to local payment rails, nor exactly when RFQ or order-book systems might mature enough to handle larger transaction sizes on-chain; Serrano described these as still in experimentation, including internal work with Uniswap hooks.