A nurse in Los Angeles sends part of her paycheck home through a stablecoin wallet. Within minutes, her mother in Guadalajara receives pesos via SPEI.
Meanwhile in São Paulo, a café owner closes her day’s sales through Pix and moves her profits into USDT — a digital dollar that won’t lose value overnight.
These are small pieces of a bigger system that Latin America is building quietly and fast.
Stablecoins and instant payment rails are merging into the region’s new financial infrastructure where value moves as data, across networks that are public, programmable, and local.
The New Rails: Stablecoins + Pix + SPEI
Latin America’s financial evolution starts with two layers: a value layer and a movement layer.
Stablecoins act as the store of value. They’re the digital dollars people hold when inflation eats into savings.
In Argentina and Brazil, stablecoins already make up a majority of crypto activity. According to Chainalysis’s 2024 Geography of Cryptocurrency Report (Latin America chapter), 61.8% of Argentina’s crypto transaction volume moved through stablecoins between mid-2023 and mid-2024, compared with 59.8% in Brazil — well above the ~44.7% global average.
Pix and SPEI are the movement layer.
Brazil’s Pix, launched by the Central Bank of Brazil in 2020, now processes hundreds of millions of transactions every day and is accepted by nearly every merchant in the country.
Launched by the Central Bank of Brazil in 2020, Pix lets anyone send money instantly, 24/7 — free for individuals and accepted almost everywhere. It now processes hundreds of millions of transactions a day and has become the country’s default way to pay, setting a global benchmark for real-time payments.
Mexico’s SPEI, run by Banco de México, powers instant transfers between banks and fintech apps. Together, they’ve created a cultural shift: people expect money to move instantly and cost nothing.The next step is connecting both layers.
Stablecoins handle liquidity in dollars; Pix and SPEI handle the local rails.
Building the Connective Tissue: Orchestration and Compliance
Behind every Pix transfer or USDT remittance sits another layer of code deciding how money moves. That layer is payment orchestration — the connective tissue between stablecoin liquidity, instant-payment rails, and compliance frameworks.
Orchestration is the logic that connects multiple payment rails — Pix, SPEI, cards, or stablecoins — and routes each transaction through the fastest, cheapest, or most compliant path. It’s the invisible layer that keeps money moving seamlessly across systems.
In Latin America, orchestration has to do more than route payments. It has to navigate regulation, convert currencies, and bridge different infrastructures — some blockchain-based, some run by central banks.
FX-aware routing
Cross-border payments here rarely follow one straight line. An orchestration engine can decide whether it’s faster or cheaper to send funds as USDT → BRL via an exchange, or through a local banking partner that handles instant settlement. The goal is efficiency, not ideology.
Local coverage
Each country has its default rail. Pix in Brazil. SPEI in Mexico. OXXO Pay for cash users. Good orchestration treats these not as optional add-ons but as core rails, matching each with the right currency and compliance flow.
Regulatory infrastructure
In Brazil, the VASP license , this licence makes a crypto company operate more like a regulated financial institution — same compliance duties, but in the digital-asset world puts crypto service providers under Central Bank supervision.
VASPs must segregate client funds, report suspicious activity to COAF, and follow AML/CFT standards similar to banks.
Mexico’s Fintech Law defines how digital-asset firms plug into the formal system.
Embedding these checks — from KYC to tax validation — turns compliance from a barrier into part of the infrastructure itself.These regulatory foundations make something else possible: coordination.
Once digital-asset firms follow the same rules and reporting standards as banks, their systems can connect more easily. That’s where payment orchestration comes in — the layer that synchronizes all these moving parts, from stablecoin liquidity to Pix and SPEI rails, into one operational network.
“Orchestration lets you accept payments across multiple channels while managing routing and reconciliation behind the scenes,” said Diego Pérez, of CellPoint Digital, on the Allplane Podcast (January 2025, wording condensed). “Latin America stands out in the use of alternative payments — orchestration is what connects them.”
Allplane Podcast
EBANX, in its Breaking Barriers video series, called orchestration “the core engine that localizes global payments by integrating local methods, FX, and risk.”
EBANX YouTube
This is the invisible upgrade that lets local and global systems work as one.
Case Studies: Infrastructure in Motion
Some companies are already wiring the pipes that connect stablecoins, local rails, and real-time payments.
Bitso — The Bridge Between Crypto and SPEI
Mexico’s Bitso has quietly become one of Latin America’s most important remittance platforms.
The company says it now handles around 10 percent of the U.S.–Mexico remittance corridor, worth billions of dollars a year. Its infrastructure converts USDT inflows directly into SPEI payouts, often in under ten minutes — a process Bitso calls “from crypto to cash” (Bitso Business Blog, 2025).
Stablecoins bring dollar power to inflation-prone economies. People save, earn, and pay in digital USD, then cash out through local systems like Pix or SPEI — combining instant settlement with global stability.
Under the hood, Bitso’s system is more orchestration than exchange: it matches liquidity between stablecoins, fiat, and instant-payment networks, routing transactions through whichever path clears fastest. In practice, that means families receive pesos in local accounts or wallets almost instantly, while Bitso manages the FX and blockchain conversion behind the scenes.
Mercado Pago — The Regional Wallet With Crypto Ambitions
In December 2021 Mercado Pago, the financial services arm of Mercado Libre, has let Brazilian users buy, sell, and hold Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Paxos’s USDP stablecoin directly within the app. Paxos+2PR Newswire+2
In 2023, Mercado Pago extended USDP access to Mexican users through its partnership with Paxos, deepening its crypto integration across borders. Paxos
Just last year, Mercado Pago launched Meli Dólar, a dollar-backed stablecoin for Brazilian users, reinforcing its role in building regional crypto infrastructure. Reuters
Meanwhile, its acquisition of Nikos DTVM in 2025 signals the company’s ambition to expand into investment and asset management services.
More recently, Mercado Pago has integrated Pix across its ecosystem for instant payments and merchant checkouts. Industry observers note that the next logical step is convergence: merging Pix settlement with digital-dollar storage inside the same wallet.
While no formal pilot has been announced, internal job listings and developer documentation hint at experiments with stablecoin-based liquidity management for cross-border merchants, a sign that Mercado Pago sees crypto as infrastructure, not investment.
CellPoint Digital — Exporting Orchestration to LATAM
Global payment-orchestration provider CellPoint Digital has taken its travel-industry tech to Latin America, opening operations in Mexico and Argentina to support local payment routing, FX, and reconciliation (CellPoint Press Release, 2025).
Its One Source Orchestration platform — first deployed for airlines like Air Europa and GOL Linhas Aéreas — lets merchants route transactions dynamically across cards, wallets, and alternative methods including Pix and Mercado Pago (PYMNTS, 2025).
In practice, that means a passenger in Buenos Aires can pay for a flight in pesos via Pix, while the airline settles in dollars through CellPoint’s FX layer.
This kind of orchestration architecture — built for global retail but adapted to local rails — is becoming the blueprint for regional fintechs looking to combine stablecoin liquidity, instant payments, and smart routing.
Why Infrastructure Matters
The payoff is economic.
For households, orchestration means faster, cheaper remittances — digital dollars in, local currency out, in minutes.
For merchants, it means instant settlements through Pix or SPEI instead of waiting days for card clearing.
For businesses, it offers dollar stability with local reach: treasury funds held in USDC or USDT, payouts handled by regulated instant rails.
And for governments, this infrastructure increases traceability and tax compliance without limiting innovation.
Latin America is designing a system that runs on local rules but connects seamlessly to global liquidity.
Editor’s Note
Figures and examples reflect data and public information available as of October 2025 from official sources, fintech reports, and company statements.
Some initiatives remain in pilot stages; quotes have been paraphrased for clarity.
“According to Chainalysis’s 2024 Geography of Crypto Report, 61.8% of Argentina’s stablecoin transaction volume and 59.8% of Brazil’s fall under stablecoins — well above the ~44.7% global average.”
this is worded wrong I think it doesn’t make sense.
I think you meant to say “61.8% of Argentina’s *crypto* transaction volume”
Good catch Brad! I reworded for clarity – thanks for pointed that out.