Only 16 of 494 LATAM Stablecoin Firms Provide Core Liquidity, Varys Capital Report Finds

Only 16 Specialists Among 494 Firms

A new report from venture firms Varys Capital and Verda Ventures finds that Latin America's rapidly expanding stablecoin settlement market rests on a narrow base of specialist providers. Drawing on Verda's Stablescape database, researchers screened 494 companies across the region and identified only 16 whose primary business is wholesale stablecoin-to-fiat liquidity, corporate treasury services or credit provision. The paper warns that “fragility in the system is concentrated in its thinnest layer,” and the full findings are set out in the published report.

Amit Chu, a partner at Verda Ventures, said public data makes it impossible to see which firms warehouse currency risk themselves and which pass it on to the same handful of trading desks. Verda's view, he said, is the latter. Should a core provider lose banking access, the concern is effectively exit liquidity: users converting stablecoin balances into local currency would face wider spreads, cash-outs to local bank accounts would slow or pause, and funds in transit through the failed desk could be stuck entirely.

The report stops short of proving that liquidity itself is concentrated. Stablescape does not track transaction volumes and publishes no market share figures, and exchanges and payment companies classified elsewhere in the database also supply liquidity. Chu said Verda believes some of those firms ultimately lean on the same underlying desks. He also cautioned against treating a small specialist count as a defect in itself: mature foreign exchange markets run with far fewer dealers than customer-facing firms, and what matters is redundancy and capital. Each major currency, in his view, needs several independent, well-capitalized desks with separate banking relationships, and every wallet should be able to route between multiple liquidity pools rather than a single one.

Adoption Deepens Across the Region

The concentration question lands on a market that keeps growing. Data from Chainalysis shows stablecoins accounted for 32.1% of the value of cross-border digital asset transactions in Latin America as of June 2026. Within the region, they represented 22.1% of domestic peer-to-peer activity and 17.6% of personal wallet balances. Adoption accelerated fastest in countries with the greatest monetary instability, where residents use dollar-pegged tokens to protect savings and settle trade.

The report frames Latin America as a growth opportunity rather than a case against the sector. Fragmented banking systems and high remittance costs create demand for services that move money across borders cheaply, and the authors single out cross-border payments as the most promising business line. Stablecoins already carry a large share of that flow, which is precisely why the thin specialist layer matters.

Two remedies top the paper's list. Clearer licensing rules come first: if regulators define who may supply liquidity, banks should find it easier to open accounts for those firms, reducing the single-point-of-failure risk that concerns Chu. The second is local-currency stablecoins, which could let more market makers settle transactions directly on-chain instead of routing everything through dollar rails. Chu added that global trading firms have begun quoting Latin American currency pairs, an early sign that the desk layer may broaden on its own. Neither measure is in place today, and the report does not name individual providers or quantify how much volume each handles.

Where the Risk Actually Sits

COINOTAG's read is that the report's real contribution is narrowing where the risk sits rather than measuring it. The document cannot show how concentrated trading volume actually is, so the finding should be read as a structural hypothesis: the cash-out side of the trade, which turns tokens back into pesos or reais, depends on a handful of desks nobody can currently audit. If regional regulators publish licensing frameworks and local-currency stablecoins gain traction, the desk layer should thicken and each major currency gain several independent providers. The observable next step is straightforward: more named desks quoting Latin American pairs, and clearer rules on who can bank them.