The Stablecoin Founder Map Doesn't Match the Stablecoin Volume Map
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The Stablecoin Founder Map Doesn't Match the Stablecoin Volume Map
B2B stablecoin payments across Latin America grew from under $100 million per month in early 2023 to over $6 billion per month by mid-2025, a 60x increase in 30 months driven by cross-border commerce rather than retail speculation. Consumer stablecoin products carry compounding overhead: compliance costs that scale with user count, fragile local banking relationships, and unit economics that rarely survive small retail transfers. Yellow Card, operating across 34 countries, exited its consumer business entirely to focus on B2B. Bitso built its durable position in the Mexico-U.S. corridor through business payment flows, not retail wallets. In each case, the advantage was proximity: founders who understood their corridors from the inside.
Why venture capital keeps missing stablecoin emerging markets
In 2024, 30 VC firms captured 75% of all capital raised by U.S. funds. Those funds have the stablecoin macro thesis right. They have the geography wrong.
A Sand Hill Road fund's pattern recognition about San Francisco founders provides almost no signal about which Lagos or Buenos Aires or Manila founder can execute. The counterargument is that emerging market fintech lacks viable exits. The data disagrees. OPay is seeking a $4 billion valuation ahead of a potential IPO built on African payments infrastructure, and Modern Treasury acquired Beam, a stablecoin cross-border liquidity startup, for $40 million. The exit market is forming around the same corridors Western funds have been slow to back.
Regulatory gravity compounds the concentration. The GENIUS Act and MiCA are meaningful, and institutional capital follows clarity wherever it arrives. What that framing misses is that U.S. regulatory clarity is about making stablecoins safe for compliance departments. The volume in Nigeria and Argentina requires no additional regulatory clarity, outgrows the U.S. market on nearly every metric, and is served by companies funded by regional networks that Western funds have no relationship with.
The stablecoin corridors that will produce the next generation of winners
The Philippines received $39.6 billion in personal remittances in 2025, with transfer costs averaging 5 to 7% against a stablecoin transfer cost measured in fractions of a percent. Nigeria's 2025 Investment and Securities Act brought virtual assets under formal oversight, with licensing regimes across South Africa, Botswana, Mauritius, and Namibia, and regulatory sandboxes now live across East and West Africa.
These corridors will produce the stablecoin companies of the next decade the same way Brazil produced Nubank: by building for a customer the incumbent system ignored, with local knowledge outside entrants spent years failing to replicate. El Dorado, a Latin American stablecoin super-app, crossed 600,000 users and 3 million transactions in 2025, reaching $2.7 million ARR through 12x annual growth, and became Venezuela's most downloaded crypto app. Multicoin Capital and Coinbase Ventures backed it after the market had already validated the model. Volume first, local validation second, global capital third, that sequencing will repeat across every major emerging market corridor over the next five years.
The stablecoin investment thesis most funds are missing
The stablecoin market has already split in two. One side builds enterprise infrastructure for regulated Western institutions: treasury orchestration, compliance tooling, settlement rails. The other builds dollar access for billions of people inside unstable monetary systems, where stablecoins are not a crypto product but a financial lifeline. One side controls most of the venture capital. The other already has most of the demand.
The on/off-ramp layer, where 57% of companies are locally founded in emerging markets, along with regional remittance networks and local-currency issuers across MENA, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, remains underfunded relative to the demand beneath it. Companies like Kulipa, building stablecoin payment infrastructure for African markets, and Mural Pay, focused on cross-border B2B payments across Latin America, represent the category that appears small by Western VC standards until the corridor they serve becomes impossible to ignore.
The next generation of stablecoin companies will come from founders in Lagos, São Paulo, and Manila. The funds building those relationships today will generate the best returns in stablecoins over the next decade. Those that wait until the companies appear in Crunchbase will pay the same premium investors have paid in every emerging market cycle before this one.
The map is already drawn while the volume is already there. The only thing missing is where venture capital is looking.
This article has been published in decrypt.co via Yahoo News.
The Stablecoin Founder Map Doesn't Match the Stablecoin Volume Map
Emerging markets drive most real-world stablecoin usage, yet founder concentration and venture funding remain U.S.- and Europe-centric.
finance.yahoo.com
