From dual currencies to crypto. Is Argentina a blueprint for the stablecoin future?

Argentina’s long-standing obsession with the U.S. dollar is the product of repeated economic crises and chronic inflation. 

It is also one of the reasons why the country has adopted cryptocurrency so rapidly.

An analysis by local crypto fintech Lemon Cash based on international data found that Argentina has four times as many users as the average Latin American country: 12% of the population uses some form of digital asset (a quarter of all regional activity).

By comparison, the region’s second and third-highest adoption rates belong to Venezuela (7.5%) and Peru (3%).

Argentina’s lead matters all the more given that Latin America is one of the fastest-growing crypto markets in the world.

The region logged more than US$730 billion in crypto value in 2025 (60% year-on-year growth). According to Chainalysis data cited by Lemon, this accounted for 10% of the total volume processed globally.

Volume is not the whole story. In 2025, monthly active users in Latin America grew three times faster than in the United States, rising close to 18% compared to the previous year.

A unique ‘experience’ Karina Caudillo, regional manager at OKX, one of the world’s largest exchanges, told the Herald that Argentines’ “experience” with inflation, peso devaluation, and “the historic need” to find ways of preserving the value of their savings has bred “a particular familiarity” with digital assets, especially dollar-pegged stablecoins.

Rafael de Ambrosi, CEO of on-chain services platform Twin, pointed to two additional factors working in the crypto’s favor in Argentina. The first is high economic informality (a record 45% in 2026).

“A lot of people never had real access to the formal banking system, and stablecoins ended up being the simplest way in,” De Ambrosi said.

The second, a region-wide issue, are remittances and cross-border payments, where traditional systems “are slow and expensive.”

“It’s no accident that this same combination — informality, a weak currency, dependence on remittances — turns up in other countries with very high adoption, such as Nigeria,” he added.

Carolina Gama, country manager in Argentina for Bitget, another major global exchange, said that adoption grows when “technology solves real problems.”

In Argentina, she added, cryptocurrencies and stablecoins in particular have become part of many people’s financial lives — as savings, payments, or for receiving income from abroad.

Even after retail currency controls, known locally as the cepo, were lifted in April 2025, she said, “Argentines held on to their stablecoins and, in many cases, decided to diversify their investments.”

Caudillo argued that Argentina’s experience may be “relevant for markets facing similar problems,” as well as more developed economies that are starting to explore the potential of stablecoins as financial infrastructure.

A laboratory for the future? Ignacio Giménez, business manager at Lemon Cash, said that Argentina had been “a very particular laboratory” because for years it had to live with inflation, multiple exchange rates, restrictions, and a financial system with few links to international markets.

“That sped up the search for alternatives to the traditional dollar,” he said, adding that stablecoins offered a digital currency, available at all times, that was able to move globally, something the physical dollar could not.

This makeup, he argued, could make Argentina a preview of a broader global trend. 

“First people adopt the technology because they need it, then companies do it to build increasingly global products, and then the technology becomes infrastructure and stops being visible.”

“It’s the same thing that happened with the internet,” he added. “Nobody thinks about protocols every time they send a message or pay for something. The same could happen with stablecoins and money.”

According to Matías Bari, CEO of local fintech Satoshi Tango, what is happening in Argentina’s crypto sector is a “preview” of dynamics that are being repeated — and will intensify — in many other countries.

Argentina, he said, worked as a “stress laboratory” for the technology. Many of the practices, products, and behaviors that exist in the country today “will become more common globally over the next few years.”

In economies with moderate or high inflation, he noted, “stablecoins are already growing as a store of value and a means of payment.”

That is no small matter at a time when inflation is rising in many countries on the back of volatile international oil prices caused by the war in the Middle East.

He agreed with Giménez that stablecoins are establishing themselves as the internet’s “settlement layer”: “faster, cheaper, and more programmable than traditional banking systems.”

Toward a two-currency world For Gastón Yrigoyen, CEO of Argentine financial technology infrastructure startup Pomelo, people “think and save in dollars as a way of protecting themselves from currency swings.”

While this has been a long-standing reality in Argentina, the novelty is that it is also happening in Brazil ahead of the October 4 presidential election and has already happened in Colombia and Mexico.

“It’s a reality across every emerging market,” Yrigoyen said.

Pomelo, he added, is seeing a global “meta-trend”: sooner or later, people around the world will hold two accounts, one in dollars and one in their local currency.

He described how someone in the Philippines, for example, might use their local currency at their neighborhood stores and their dollar account to pay for online platforms or travel abroad.

“If you buy on Amazon with the local Philippine currency, the Philippine bank is going to charge you a very high rate, so you’re better off buying with your dollar account,” he said.