Forks in the Road: Why Stablecoin Founders and Volume Tell Two Very Different Stories

Many people assume the stablecoin opportunity is centered where the money is — in New York, San Francisco, and London. In reality, the world’s biggest stablecoin markets are in countries where most venture capitalists have never set foot for a meeting.

In 2025, global stablecoin transaction volume surpassed $28 trillion, exceeding the combined totals of Visa and Mastercard. Yet most founders and investment capital remain clustered in the U.S. and Europe, where stablecoins are treated primarily as an institutional product. That space is already crowded: BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Fidelity are pushing into tokenized money markets and enterprise settlement, leaving considerably less room for venture-backed startups than the popular narrative suggests.

The real demand is unfolding elsewhere. Nigeria alone has more than 26 million crypto users — over one in eight adults — and 59% of them hold USDT. Across Latin America, stablecoin flows account for 7.7% of regional GDP according to IMF figures. The question is no longer whether emerging markets matter. The question is why so many VC portfolios still act as though that data doesn’t exist.

The stablecoin volume map doesn’t match the founder map

Stablescape, a platform tracking over 3,000 stablecoin and crypto-fintech companies worldwide, reports that 1,300 are headquartered in the United States. Emerging markets spanning Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East account for just 32% of tracked companies, even though they generate the bulk of real-world stablecoin volume.

In Argentina, stablecoin purchases represent more than half of all exchange transactions, fueled by triple-digit inflation and currency controls that turn accessing dollars into a bureaucratic maze. Brazil recorded $318.8 billion in crypto inflows through mid-2025, with over 90% flowing through stablecoins. Sub-Saharan Africa saw 52% year-over-year growth, receiving more than $205 billion in on-chain value. Yet the founders building infrastructure for that demand remain concentrated in cities where the problem has never been felt firsthand.

In emerging markets, stablecoins are the product itself

The Western crypto narrative tends to frame stablecoins as infrastructure for more advanced use cases — programmable settlement rails, DeFi yield, enterprise treasury management. In those markets, stablecoins enhance systems that already work. In Lagos, Buenos Aires, and Istanbul, the starting point is entirely different. For millions of people, stablecoins represent the first dependable way to hold dollar value outside of banks that fail, currencies that collapse, or intermediaries that can cut off access overnight.

B2B stablecoin payments across Latin America surged from under $100 million per month in early 2023 to over $6 billion per month by mid-2025 — a 60-fold increase in just 30 months, driven by cross-border commerce rather than retail speculation. Consumer stablecoin products carry compounding overhead: compliance costs that grow with user count, fragile local banking relationships, and unit economics that rarely hold up for small retail transfers. Yellow Card, which operates across 34 countries, shut down its consumer business entirely to focus on B2B. Bitso built its lasting position in the Mexico-U.S. corridor through business payment flows, not retail wallets. In each case, the edge came from proximity — founders who understood their corridors from the inside out.

Why venture capital keeps overlooking stablecoin emerging markets

In 2024, just 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 around San Francisco founders offers almost no insight into which Lagos, Buenos Aires, or Manila founder can actually execute. The common counterargument is that emerging market fintech lacks viable exit opportunities. The data tells a different story. OPay is targeting 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 taking shape around the very corridors that Western funds have been slow to back.

Regulatory gravity adds to the concentration. The GENIUS Act and MiCA are significant, and institutional capital follows

Clarity wherever it arrives. What that framing overlooks is that regulatory clarity in the U.S. is really about making stablecoins safe for compliance departments. The volume flowing through Nigeria and Argentina doesn’t need any extra regulatory clarity — it surpasses the U.S. market on almost every measure — and it’s handled by companies backed by regional networks that Western funds have no ties to.

The stablecoin corridors that will produce the next wave of winners

In 2025, the Philippines received $39.6 billion in personal remittances, with transfer fees averaging between 5 and 7% — compared to stablecoin transfer costs that amount to fractions of a percent. Nigeria’s 2025 Investment and Securities Act placed virtual assets under formal oversight, joining licensing frameworks already in place across South Africa, Botswana, Mauritius, and Namibia, while regulatory sandboxes are now active throughout East and West Africa.

These corridors will give rise to the stablecoin companies of the next decade the same way Brazil gave rise to Nubank — by serving customers the established system overlooked, drawing on local expertise that outsiders spent years trying and failing to duplicate. El Dorado, a Latin American stablecoin super-app, surpassed 600,000 users and 3 million transactions in 2025, hitting $2.7 million in annual revenue through 12x yearly growth, and became Venezuela’s most downloaded crypto app. Multicoin Capital and Coinbase Ventures invested only after the market had already proven the model. Volume first, local validation second, global capital third — that sequence will repeat across every major emerging-market corridor over the next five years.

The stablecoin investment thesis most funds are overlooking

The stablecoin market has already divided into two distinct segments. One side builds enterprise infrastructure for regulated Western institutions — treasury orchestration, compliance tools, and settlement rails. The other side provides dollar access to billions of people living within unstable monetary systems, where stablecoins aren’t a crypto novelty but a financial lifeline. One side commands the lion’s share of venture capital. The other already commands the lion’s share of 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 spanning MENA, Latin America, and Southeast Asia, remains underfunded relative to the demand sitting beneath it. Companies like Kulipa, which is building stablecoin payment infrastructure for African markets, and Mural Pay, focused on cross-border B2B payments across Latin America, represent the category that looks small by Western VC standards until the corridor they serve becomes impossible to ignore.

The next generation of stablecoin companies will be founded by entrepreneurs in Lagos, São Paulo, and Manila. The funds that are building those relationships today will earn the strongest returns in stablecoins over the next decade. Those that wait until these companies show up on Crunchbase will pay the same premium that investors have paid in every emerging-market cycle before this one.

The map is already drawn, and the volume is already there. The only thing missing is where venture capital is looking.