Earn up to 50% APR
Boost earnings with NFTs
Play, HODL & earn more
The Killer App in Latin America Is Holding Stablecoins Not Spending Them and Most Fintechs Have Missed It
-
Bybit's Claudia Wang has identified what she describes as the fundamental misunderstanding that Western fintech companies have about Latin American users of dollar-denominated digital assets: they do not want to use stablecoins for transactions and convert back to local currency. They want to hold dollars. The transaction is a side effect of the dollar holding strategy, not the primary goal. In economies facing persistent inflation, currency depreciation, and limited access to traditional dollar-denominated savings vehicles, a stable digital dollar that can be held indefinitely without converting is a genuinely different product from a remittance tool that happens to use stablecoins as a settlement rail. Fintechs that have built their products around transaction flows are optimizing for the wrong use case.
The second misunderstanding Wang highlights is the user profile. Most crypto fintech products have been built for a 25-year-old crypto trader who is comfortable with self-custody, private keys, and digital wallets. The actual Latin American remittance customer is 40 to 60 years old, not necessarily tech-savvy, and has one primary requirement: certainty that the money landed. Wang put it directly: if your product makes a 50-year-old factory worker think for more than 30 seconds before sending $300 to his mother in Honduras, the product has already failed. The vision Wang articulates for what winning in this market looks like is a closed-loop ecosystem where users can remit, hold, spend, and earn within a single platform built around local payment rails, stablecoin liquidity, and a trust layer calibrated for users who have been consistently underserved rather than users who already understand crypto.
