Latin America’s stablecoin liquidity may hinge on a handful of providers, Verda Ventures says

Latin America’s stablecoin payment stack may look broad on the surface and still depend on a very small set of firms at the point where users actually want out: local fiat. That matters for PSPs, exchanges, and treasury desks because a banking hit to one provider can turn “instant cash-out” into slower settlements, wider spreads, and funds stuck in transit.

1. In a report from Varys Capital and Verda Ventures, based on Verda’s Stablescape database, researchers reviewed 494 companies in Latin America and found only 16 whose primary business is wholesale stablecoin-to-fiat liquidity, corporate treasury, and credit. Verda Ventures partner Amit Chu said this means “fragility in the system is concentrated in its thinnest layer.”
2. Chu told Cointelegraph that the visible market has “many sellers of liquidity and very few specialists,” but public data does not show how much currency risk those firms warehouse themselves versus passing it to the same few desks and exchanges. Verda’s view is that this concentration sits behind the scenes, at the liquidity layer rather than the customer-facing layer.
3. The operational risk is at the exit. According to Chu, if a key provider loses banking access, users could face higher costs or delays when converting stablecoins into local currency. “Spreads would widen, cash-outs to local bank accounts would slow or pause, and funds in transit with the failed desk could be stuck,” he said.
4. Stablecoins already play a material role in the region’s crypto economy. A September Chainalysis report said that by June 2026, stablecoins accounted for 32.1% of cross-border crypto value, 22.1% of domestic P2P activity, and 17.6% of personal wallet balances in Latin America.
5. The report also notes that countries with the greatest monetary instability showed the fastest stablecoin adoption. Chu said the biggest lever for reducing concentration is licensing, because clearer rules would make it easier for banks to serve liquidity providers. He also pointed to local-currency stablecoins and said global trading firms are beginning to quote Latin American currency pairs.

Chu drew a useful comparison for operators who are used to thinking about FX and payments infrastructure as a plumbing problem: mature FX markets also have relatively few dealers. The issue is not the number of names on a slide deck, but whether there is redundancy, separate banking relationships, and enough capital. In his words, “each major currency should have several independent, well-capitalized desks with separate banking relationships, and each wallet should be able to route between multiple players.”