Summary
- Latin America bucked the bear market. The region’s crypto economy saw $593.8 billion in activity, with an overall growth of 9.8%. This growth points to sustained demand for crypto, even in a year when global markets faced headwinds.
- Stablecoins gained ground across every measure we examined. By June, stablecoins accounted for 32% of cross-border value, 22% of domestic P2P activity, and 17.6% of personal wallet balances. The takeaway: stablecoins are becoming a more important part of how Latin Americans move, hold, and access cryptocurrency.
- Adoption looked different across Latin America’s markets. Brazil — our top country for grassroots adoption — remained the region’s largest crypto economy by far. Meanwhile, Venezuela’s crypto economy surged 107.2% and Mexico’s monthly cross-border stablecoin activity climbed to over 4x its early 2024 level.
- Different forces are pushing crypto forward. Our findings show that crypto is becoming both more useful to everyday Latin Americans and more deeply embedded in the region’s financial systems, even if what’s driving this looks very different from market to market.
Latin America — home to Brazil, our top country for grassroots adoption — was the sixth-largest crypto economy, with $593.8 billion in activity. The region’s crypto economy — a combination of service inflows, domestic peer-to-peer activity, and cross-border transfers — grew 9.8%.
What is driving Latin America’s growth? Our analysis finds it’s the region’s stronger-than-ever desire for crypto and a market increasingly equipped to meet it.
Latin America “has a trifecta of conditions that drive demand” for crypto, says Ben Reid, global head of stablecoins at Bitso. He points to “persistent inflation, currency volatility, and restrictive capital controls across several countries.” This trio is pushing households and businesses to look beyond often volatile local currencies — and toward crypto.
Latin America’s need for cross-border payment options is another important driver, particularly in Mexico, which hosts one of the world’s largest remittance corridors. Here, crypto offers a potentially more efficient way to move value across borders and between currencies.
“Here in Latin America, all this adoption comes from necessity,” said Carlos Peralta, senior public policy expert at Bitso. “It’s not just adoption for adoption’s sake.”
A concentrated market, but growth is broadening
A few big markets power most of Latin America’s crypto economy. Brazil led the region in the 2026 period, with $252.5 billion in activity. Argentina was second largest at $88.5 billion; Mexico was third largest at $77.6 billion. Venezuela and Colombia rounded out the top five at $39.1 billion and $29.1 billion. Together, these five countries accounted for over 80% of the region’s crypto economy in the 12 months ending June 30, 2026.
Despite Brazil’s status as the top country for crypto adoption globally, and its dominant share of economic activity regionally, it was not responsible for Latin America’s growth in the 2026 period. Brazil’s crypto economy actually contracted by 1.6%. But Mexico (+25.5%), Argentina (+15.3%), and Colombia (+13.8%) grew enough to offset Brazil and outpace the world. Venezuela, too, experienced very substantial growth at 107.2%, for reasons we’ll explore.
Some smaller markets moved faster still. Honduras grew 361.6% and Nicaragua 186.4% — although from much smaller bases. Others moved sharply in the opposite direction: Trinidad and Tobago fell 55.8% and Guatemala was down 51.4%.
The factors behind crypto growth vary widely across the Americas. In some markets, such as Mexico, crypto is increasingly intersecting with existing financial offerings; in others, such as Venezuela and Argentina, it is providing a crucial alternative to traditional financial services or access to much-needed foreign currency that’s in short supply. This may help explain why the pace — and character — of adoption can differ so sharply across Latin America.
Stablecoins take a larger role
One of the clearest signs of how crypto use is evolving across Latin America and adapting to need is the growing role of stablecoins.
Thanks to a year of rapid expansion, stablecoin activity across major Latin American markets operated at a dramatically larger scale. For instance, Mexico’s quarterly stablecoin service inflows were more than eight times their level in the 2021 report period, reaching $8.4 billion in Q2 2026. Colombia’s stablecoin service inflows likewise increased but at roughly half the scale, closing Q2 2026 at $3.5 billion.
At the same time, stablecoins took up a larger share of the crypto that individuals held and moved across the region. Stablecoins gained sustained ground across every measure we examined in 2026. By June, they accounted for nearly a third (32.1%) of cross-border value, as well as 22.1% of domestic P2P and 17.6% of personal wallet balances. Although stablecoins’ rising share of total crypto value does not necessarily mean stablecoin activity increased at the same pace — because a decline in other crypto asset value can also affect the measure — the trend nonetheless underscores their increasingly dominant role in Latin America’s crypto economy.
Taken together, these measures point to a market that experienced a sustainable surge in stablecoin activity. Stablecoins have established a much larger base of use than in earlier years while becoming more prominent within the region’s actual economy.
Juanita Rodríguez Kattah, Bitso’s country manager for Colombia, told us this growth reflects increasing institutional confidence in stablecoins. “The technology is now trusted enough to carry real corporate volume,” she said.
Where and how stablecoin growth is happening is also revealing. In Latin America’s key markets, stablecoin flows through centralized exchanges outpaced the global rate (excluding Latin America). Activity through decentralized venues was largely flat or declining, period over period, even as stablecoin DEX activity outpaced global trends in both Colombia and Mexico.
The divergence suggests that regional stablecoin growth may increasingly concentrate in centralized channels. This is consistent with growing need for fiat access, payments, and other traditional financial rails across Latin America’s developing economies.
Latin American services outperform self-custody
The way Latin Americans hold crypto is also changing. During the report period, both self-custody and service balances fell across the region, as prices cratered from all-time highs during the crypto market correction that began in October 2025. But, amid this broad-based decline, self-custody balances fell much more sharply, by 66.7%, compared with 28.0% for services.
That divergence builds on a longer-term structural shift toward services. The share of Latin American crypto balances held with services has risen steadily in recent years, reaching 71.2% in June 2026 — well above the global share of 68.0%.
The personal wallet is giving way to the platform.
This is a notable change for a region more historically associated with self-custody. Holding one’s own keys can offer independence from intermediaries — an important feature in markets where economic uncertainty or distrust in domestic financial institutions has helped shape crypto adoption.
This growing preference for services may point to a new stage in the region’s adoption story. As Latin Americans increasingly use crypto to move money, make payments, convert assets, and access liquidity, they may also be looking for more established services through which to do it.
Gabriel Campa, head of digital assets at Towerbank, sees this demand firsthand. He told us his Panama-based bank initially expected interest primarily from existing Bitcoin holders and crypto traders. Instead, customers were often looking to solve much more familiar financial needs.
“We expected interest from people who already held Bitcoin or traded crypto. But we also found individuals and businesses that simply needed a better way to receive funds, move dollars, make international payments, convert digital assets or access liquidity,” he said.
For Campa, that demand increasingly means bringing crypto and traditional financial services together.
“The common point across markets is that customers increasingly do not want their bank account in one place and their digital assets somewhere else. They want to receive, hold, convert, transfer, spend and access financial products from the same relationship,” he said.
The economic pressures that helped drive Latin America’s crypto adoption remain important. But users now have a broader range of services through which to put crypto to work. The custody data suggests they are increasingly choosing to use them.
However, the decline in self-custody balances does not necessarily mean users are moving away from self-custody altogether. Balance values can also move with the value and composition of the assets users hold — and beneath the headline figure, different assets moved in very different directions. Self-custodied bitcoin fell 78% in value over the period, while self-custodied stablecoins rose 66%, lifting stablecoins to roughly a fifth of the region’s self-custodied holdings
The longer-term trend, nevertheless, still points toward services.
Inside Brazil’s crypto economy
Brazil continues to dominate Latin America’s crypto economy. The country received 31.6% of the region’s crypto value in the 2022 period; today, its share stands at 43.7%. Nearly half of the crypto value moving through Latin America now passes through Brazil.
This continued dominance comes despite a recent slowdown: Brazil contracted modestly during the 2026 report period. Its pullback is not indicative of Brazilians suddenly losing their appetite for crypto. Zoomed out, Brazil’s crypto economy expanded 179.4% from the 2024 reporting period through the end of the 2026 reporting period.
Brazil’s crypto economy is becoming more concentrated among domestic, or Brazil-based, platforms — potentially a result of greater regulatory clarity, investment, and stronger local offerings. Domestic exchanges that once accounted for just 1.5% of inflows now receive 12.5%.
This shift is particularly notable because the rest of Latin America moved in the opposite direction: domestic platforms in other countries all lost share to international competition. But in Brazil, local providers are playing a larger role in how users access and move crypto.
This migration accelerated just as Brazil’s domestic exchange landscape faced a shakeup. In February 2026, Banco Central do Brasil (BCB) introduced new rules for the country’s virtual asset service providers, affecting their governance, risk management, security, and compliance. Crucially, the new rules also introduced substantial minimum capital requirements. While designed to strengthen Brazil’s crypto market, those higher barriers could prove difficult for smaller firms to meet — setting the stage for further consolidation.
“Many payment providers are facing a hard time because of it,” said Fabricio Tota, VP of Crypto Affairs at Mercado Bitcoin, Brazil’s largest exchange. “If we fast forward 12 months, I think we will see many fewer crypto-native players here in Brazil.”
BCB’s higher barriers to entry may end up instilling greater consumer confidence in the firms that survive, says Julia Rosin, President of ABCripto and Head of LATAM Policy at Coinbase. “When rules arrive, trust follows.” She says stronger regulations are the single most important factor in the long-term growth of Brazil’s retail crypto scene.
Rosin describes this transition as “institutional maturation.” The distinction helps explain what is happening beneath Brazil’s slowing topline growth. Clearer regulations give banks, corporates, fintechs, and other established financial institutions greater confidence to engage with crypto counterparties, potentially expanding B2B demand and making it easier to build digital-asset products within existing financial businesses.
Brazil’s stablecoin economy
Alongside Brazil’s increasingly centralized crypto-business scene is a bustling domestic on-chain economy. The value of Brazil’s stablecoin economy in particular grew 495%. This growth outpaced regional growth (excluding Brazil), which sat at 89.4%.
Helping drive this growth are Brazil’s businesses, said ABCripto’s Rosin. “The market’s own view is that stablecoins are for companies first — ahead of financial institutions and consumers.” She said businesses are using stablecoins for liquidity and also to make cross-border transfers.
Bitso’s Reid shared a similar view: “In Brazil, stablecoins have been more of a B2B” tool, he said. The success of BCB’s digital payments system — called Pix, which is used by 91% of Brazilians — makes stablecoins less prominent for everyday payments by regular consumers.
Still, stablecoin adoption is accelerating in Brazil much faster than in the rest of the region, which is also growing, across all transfer sizes. Brazilian within-country P2P stablecoin transfers of $10,000 to $100,000, for instance, grew 562%, whereas the rest of the region grew only 209%.For transfers between $100 and $1,000, this gap was even more pronounced, with Brazil growing 666% and the rest of the region 252%.
Brazil also stands out in how people are holding stablecoins. Since July 2024, the number of Brazilian wallets holding at least $10,000 in stablecoins has increased 347%, far ahead of Mexico at 91%, Argentina at 82%, and Chile at 47%. The divergence becomes particularly pronounced from mid-2025 onward, suggesting that Brazil is adding a growing cohort of higher-value stablecoin holders alongside the rapid increase in transaction activity.
Venezuela’s flight to crypto
If Brazil represents the scale and maturation of Latin America’s crypto economy, Venezuela represents its most acute case of crypto as financial necessity. Years of inflation, currency depreciation, and limited access to dollars had already pushed households and businesses toward alternative ways to hold and move value. In 2026, political rupture accelerated that shift.
In January 2026, the United States placed President Nicolás Maduro into its custody, upending the country’s already shaky systems and pushing people to crypto en masse. The event juiced a usually-lagging crypto economy. For the first time this decade, Venezuela was leading the region.
Following the arrest, Venezuela’s crypto economy erupted with activity. Stablecoin payments surged as people fled the perennially inflationary bolívar for dollar-based crypto assets.
Cross-border net outflows also increased. In the quarter immediately following Maduro’s arrest, 891.7% more crypto left the country than the period before.
Those outflows were not enough to derail Venezuela’s broad growth story. The country’s crypto economy reached $39.1 billion in activity in the report period, a 107.2% increase. That growth rate was nearly eight times that of Colombia, the regional market closest to Venezuela’s overall crypto activity.
Zooming in on domestic P2P stablecoin activity for Venezuela paints another clear picture of how the country’s growth in crypto activity tracked the political shock. Relative to Latin America’s three largest markets, Venezuela moved from below the regional growth benchmark in late 2025 to a sharp period of outperformance immediately following Maduro’s arrest.
Relative growth peaked at roughly 65 points above the benchmark around early February, indicating that Venezuelan P2P stablecoin activity was expanding substantially faster than in the region’s largest markets. But the divergence was short-lived, returning to the broader market growth trend by March, briefly moving positive again in April, and falling below the benchmark by late May. This seeming boom-bust pattern was actually a normalization where P2P usage settled back down, matching the broader Latin American growth trend.
Crypto’s everyday role in Venezuela
The post-January surge built on a shift already underway in Venezuela: crypto, and stablecoins in particular, is becoming more embedded in everyday life in the country.
Marianella Vanci, senior reporter at CriptoNoticias, describes an “accelerated redollarization” increasingly taking place outside traditional banking channels, through stablecoins such as USDT and USDC.
Merchants Vanci interviewed in Venezuela reported receiving close to 40% of their income in USDT, while freelancers, businesses, and remote workers reported also increasingly receiving payments in crypto. For these users, stablecoins offer a way to transact while limiting exposure to bolívar depreciation and some of the frictions associated with traditional financial channels.
The events of January 2026 appear to have broadened Venezuela’s existing crypto user base. Vanci observed an influx of first-time users alongside the reactivation of previously inactive P2P users as political and economic uncertainty increased. Rather than creating Venezuela’s stablecoin economy, the shock appears to have accelerated adoption of infrastructure and habits that were already in place.
Mexico as a cross-border stablecoin hub
Our analysis finds that Mexico is 11th overall in our grassroots adoption index. It is Latin America’s third-largest crypto economy, with $77.6 billion in activity during the report period. Over $47 billion (61%) of those flows came through stablecoins.
Historically much of Mexico’s demand for stablecoins has been for the dollar-denominated variants that dominate the global crypto economy. That’s beginning to shift, says Bitso’s Ben Reid: “We are also seeing strong demand for peso-denominated stablecoins like MXNB as a fiat ramp currency, because companies struggle to find reliable fiat ramp and custody solutions within Mexico.”
The growth of Mexico’s local stablecoins is part of its strengthening peer-to-peer economy; Mexico ranks eighth overall for its domestic scene.
But Mexico’s single-strongest facet in our adoption index is cross-border flows. It ranks fifth in the world.
Monthly stablecoin value on corridors with either endpoint in Mexico reached $1.8 billion in June 2026 — roughly four times its early 2024 level — and was still climbing at the end of the period.
The U.S.-Mexico corridor is particularly important to this growth. One of the world’s largest remittance corridors, banks and money transfer providers have traditionally dominated it. Stablecoins are becoming a meaningful part of how value moves between the two countries, said Reid.
The future of crypto in Latin America
This year’s data captures two sides of Latin America’s crypto market. One is about growth from maturation. In Brazil, for instance, a more comprehensive regulatory framework is taking shape, bringing greater certainty and new offerings to the market even as smaller players face pressure. ABCripto’s Rosin describes this certainty as key to unlocking institutional adoption.
The other is about growth from necessity. Venezuela is the clearest example of a dynamic we have seen across the region for years: where traditional finance falls short, demand for crypto becomes stronger.
While different forces are at play, they are leading to similar outcomes: crypto assets are becoming more deeply embedded in how people and businesses hold, move, and access money across the region. As Bitso’s Reid put it, “crypto, and stablecoins in particular, has evolved beyond early adoption to become an integral part of Latin America’s financial landscape.”
The question that remains is how far this integration will go, especially in terms of institutional growth and investment. As Campa puts it, “Until now, much of the industry has concentrated on helping customers buy, sell and hold crypto.” The next step is connecting those assets to the real economy.
Regardless of how deeply crypto becomes integrated with institutional finance, our analysis suggests its practical role across Latin America will continue to expand.
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