Latin America stablecoins

Overview

Latin America has more local currency stablecoins than any region outside Europe, and they do a different job from the ones elsewhere on this map. In most regions a local currency coin is an attempt to build a domestic payment instrument. Here, most of them are rails: the on and off ramp between a national currency and a dollar position, issued by the exchange that operates the ramp.

Ripio is the clearest case. Its local currency tokens map almost exactly onto the countries where it runs an exchange, which is a product decision rather than a monetary one, and it explains why the roster below is wide across currencies and shallow within each of them.

Sources: Ripio, Transfero BRZ

Market structure

Brazil is the deepest single market in the region and the only one with genuine competition between issuers. BRZ is the oldest of them and is deployed across more chains than any other Latin American coin, which is also what makes its supply hardest to state honestly.

Mexico and Colombia each carry several coins from unrelated issuers, and Argentina, Chile and Peru carry a small number each. Two issuers account for most of the breadth: Ripio, whose wrapped local currency tokens follow its exchange footprint across Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Peru, and Mento, whose Latin American tokens are not backed by fiat at all. Mento runs a reserve holding other issuers' fiat backed stablecoins behind its dollar and euro units, and separately a collateralised debt position system in which a currency token is borrowed against the dollar unit. When DIA read Mento's reserve dashboard on 5 August 2026, its Latin American tokens sat in the reserve backed set rather than the borrowed one, so a Mento real is a claim on a reserve of other issuers' stablecoins rather than on reais anywhere.

Those models are worth holding apart when reading the roster. A wrapped token held against fiat at an exchange and a protocol token standing on a reserve of other issuers' stablecoins answer very different questions about what happens under stress, and neither the ticker nor the peg currency signals which one you are looking at.

Sources: Ripio, Mento protocol documentation, collateralized debt positions, Mento protocol documentation, the Reserve, Transfero BRZ, Mento reserve dashboard

What this map tracks

BRZ is the reason this region shaped part of how DIA reports supply at all. The token is deployed across many chains and moves between several of them through a bridge the issuer operates. Adding the contract balances together would count the same real reais more than once, so DIA reads and reports supply per chain and withholds a cross chain total where the bridge topology makes that total meaningless.

That is a smaller claim than a headline number, and it is the one we can defend. Elsewhere in the region the constraint is different: several coins have no contract address recorded that we have been able to read, and those pages carry no supply figure. That absence describes our coverage, not the coin.

Sources: brz-token-bridge repository, Transfero transparency report, stamped 2024-03-31

Common questions