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From our experience on the ground, Latin America has an acute demand for cross-border payments. We’ve seen this pull across a number of different types of transactions, such as remittances, trade finance payments, and treasury management flows. The infrastructure servicing these volumes is decades old, and the fragmented banking rails result in payments being slow and expensive. The inadequacy of the legacy systems has only become more apparent as the appetite for cross-border payments has continued to expand, driven by the rise of remote work and the expansion of global supply chains.

Stablecoins offer a solution, serving as an attractive alternative to legacy systems. Stablecoins, such as USDT and USDC, can be transferred instantly between wallets on high-throughput blockchains with negligible fees. These stablecoins can then be exchanged for US dollars or local FIAT at the recipient’s location, in a process known as the Stablecoin Sandwich. This process enables direct money movement by circumventing inefficient legs of the correspondent banking system, removing unnecessary middlemen and fee takers from the payments flow. As a result of this direct movement, settlement times can be reduced from hours or days to minutes. Cross-border payments using stablecoins typically cost 0.5-3.0% of a transaction’s value (link), compared to an average transaction fee of 6.35% on a remittance payment that travels over legacy rails. In addition to cheaper transaction costs, stablecoins enable capital efficiencies by reducing the need to pre-fund bank accounts across geographies, a popular approach used by the last wave of fintech companies.

The usefulness of stablecoins in payments is evident, and global stablecoin adoption is rising steadily. In August of 2025, stablecoins were used to facilitate $10.2B in payments volume, up from $4.3B in August 2024 (link). The value of issued stablecoins stands at $275B (link) in June 2026, with the US Treasury projecting the amount of issued stablecoins to reach $2T by 2028 (link).

We have been following the growing opportunity in the payments sector closely, as laid out in our article last year (link). Trace Finance has been one of the leading stars across LatAm, and we’re thrilled to announce we are leading Trace’s $32M Series A funding round. Trace is a cross-border payments orchestration provider that uses stablecoins to facilitate faster, cheaper, and more transparent transactions across LatAm and beyond.

Why cross-border payments need stablecoins

Stablecoin-powered payments show powerful product-market fit, especially in emerging markets, and companies like Trace are well-positioned to service the growing demand. Based in NYC, Trace's starting point is Brazil, LatAm’s largest market. In 2025, banks in Brazil processed $1.8T of foreign exchange volume (link), excluding bank-to-bank transfers. Bernardo, Rafael and Leone saw an opportunity to use stablecoins alongside traditional banking rails in order to better service this volume. They have leveraged their knowledge of blockchains, payment orchestration, and FX in order to build Trace into a rising powerhouse. Their vision has translated into a leading payments infrastructure provider that is well-positioned from both a technology and regulatory perspective. The company is the one of the first providers with the licensing and infrastructure to complete both eFX and VASP operations, as required in the Brazilian Central Bank's recently published Resolution 521 and 561.

Trace provides services across multiple pieces of the stablecoin sandwich journey, including orchestration, on and off-ramping, and FX. This allows them to offer the benefits of stablecoin-powered payments while also outcompeting incumbents on price. The team has already secured impressive customers like dLocal, Pagseguro, FalconX, Conduit, DolarApp, OKX, Bybit, and Yellowcard and has processed over $10B of institutional crossborder volume. This validates the institutional quality of their product and team, and the existing friction involved in standing up the necessary legacy infrastructure in Brazil.

Brazil, Latin America and beyond

We expect Trace to not only be the leading cross-border payments provider for Brazil, but to keep accelerating their rapid growth. As Trace expands, it has the potential to become the primary financial services partner for payment service providers and enterprises looking to expand or grow their operations in LatAm. The team is currently focused on winning the Brazilian market, but are already seeing traction in Argentina and Colombia, with plans to expand their solutions into Mexico and beyond.

Strong founder-market fit

The team behind Trace consists of payments and stablecoin experts, who understand the demand for stablecoin cross-border payments. Bernardo and Rafael first met while working together at Transfero. Transfero is one of the first and most important blockchain companies in Brazil, launching the first stablecoin (BRZ) and paving the way for a generation of new founders. At Transfero, the two covered exchange listings and trading, gaining direct experience in the importance of liquid markets. They then started one of Brazil’s first and largest trading desks, moving over half a billion worth of BTC and lived the need for cross-border payments first hand. As a result they founded Trace, and were able to attract Leone to come out of semi-retirement to join them as CTO. Leone was an early team member at TrustWallet, which was acquired by Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world, and grew to over 225M users (link).

We’re incredibly excited to partner with the Trace team on the journey to bring stablecoin payments to everyone in LatAm and beyond. Their mission of enabling companies to move money globally is fully aligned with what stablecoins and blockchains are meant to do, and we’re honored to back them in order to make it happen.

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