Stablecoins Found Their Biggest Fans Where VCs Forgot to Look 🌍

Stablecoin transaction volume crossed $28 trillion globally in 2025, surpassing Visa and Mastercard combined, while most founders and capital backing the sector remain concentrated in the United States and Europe. Stablescape, which tracks over 3,000 stablecoin and crypto-fintech companies globally, identifies 1,300 of those companies as U.S.-based. Emerging markets across Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East account for just 32% of tracked companies, despite generating the majority of real-world stablecoin volume on the platform's data.

Nigeria alone has more than 26 million crypto users, equivalent to more than one in eight adults, with 59% of them holding USDT according to industry data cited by Decrypt. Argentina has seen stablecoin purchases make up over half of all exchange transactions, driven by triple-digit inflation and currency controls that restrict dollar access. Brazil registered $318.8 billion in crypto inflows through mid-2025, with over 90% flowing through stablecoins, while sub-Saharan Africa grew 52% year-over-year, receiving more than $205 billion in on-chain value. Across Latin America, stablecoin flows represent 7.7% of regional GDP according to IMF data.

The institutional layer in the U.S. and Europe is already being absorbed by incumbents. BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Fidelity are moving into tokenized money markets and enterprise settlement, narrowing the available space for venture-backed startups focused on those markets. Facundo Werning, LATAM head for stablecoin issuer Agora and former Tether expansion manager for Argentina, told Decrypt that he observed a "notable increase in volume across" Argentine crypto dollar markets during the October midterm legislative elections, which were won by President Javier Milei's party.

On the demand side, more than 3,000 companies are tracked globally by Stablescape, and the geographic mismatch between founders and users has drawn attention from infrastructure providers targeting emerging-market use cases. Opera and the Celo Foundation announced at Binance Blockchain Week that they are extending stablecoin access, though full details of the partnership were not specified in the announcement cited. The discrepancy between where stablecoin companies are incorporated and where stablecoins are actually used continues to shape deployment decisions across the sector.