P2P Markets in LATAM - Buenos Aires 2025

Hi everyone. I'm Guermo. I'm super happy to to be here. Uh thanks everyone for for joining and for the invite. Uh let me see if this works.

Okay. Okay. Let's go. Um again, um I'm the founder of El Dorado. For those uh who don't know El Dorado or haven't heard of El Dorado before, El Dorado uh is uh a stable coin powered super app for Latin America.

We started with the idea of building a stable coin peer-to-peer marketplace. Pretty inspired in my early days as a local bitcoins taxful trader. Um I'm originally from Venezuela. I've experienced hyperinflation in first person for many many years. I'm a I'm a Venezuelan migrant myself.

among I'm among one of the 7 million Venezuelans who live uh abroad and have to uh experience all these issues with currency controls uh sending money back home uh scarcity of US dollars and and those are all things that uh inspired us to to build uh El Dorado. um my my introduction uh they they they already uh share a little bit of of some of the the details. So I'll I'll jump right into the uh presentation. So today I really want to highlight the importance of uh peer-to-peer markets in Latin America and the importance of having uh peer-to-peer infrastructure for on and off ramps. Uh starting with the the main uh problem, the main problem that we have on our region is that we have over 80 or 100 uh payment methods that are completely fragmented.

Every uh financial uh ecosystem is isolated from from each other. So if you have money on your bank account in Colombia, it is almost impossible to send money to a bank account in Argentina and then to a bank account in Brazil and then to a bank account in the US. You need to use uh multiple intermediaries and it's costly. The average cost of our remittance for uh LATAM is about 6%. So many people are are suffering from from this issue.

Uh on the other side of the spectrum, uh Latin America is actually leading when it comes to realtime payment systems. I don't know if you've heard of PICSS in Brazil, but PICSS has become one of the dominant uh payment methods uh in in Brazil, and it's it's been an example for for the whole world in terms of financial inclusion and and real-time payment solutions. It was a system developed by the Brazilian central bank in 2020 and today is moving more than three uh more than $3 trillion per year. So pretty much a big portion of the Brazilian economy is moving through these realtime payment systems. And the reason why this is important is because we need this uh real-time payment solutions, but we also need these solutions to be interoperable with other solutions across LATAM.

That's precisely what we're building at Elo Dorado with some of our uh rails. So we uh leverage uh stable coin liquidity uh USDT liquidity in particular in many of these LATAM countries and this allows us to uh easily swap between payment method uh balances from one currency from one currency and one country to the other. uh our average fees are between 0.5 and 1%. It's a it's a significant improvement compared to the 6% average remittance fees.

Essentially, uh, one of the, uh, most important things, uh, as well about, uh, about peer-to-peer markets is that they allow for, uh, price discovery, especially in some countries like Venezuela, Bolivia, or Argentina where you have some, uh, currency limitations or you have some caps at the time of purchasing US dollars. So we enable this uh kind of free markets where people can go and buy and sell and post ads for buying and selling USDT and USDC with all these different local payment methods. So in in that way we enable cashins and cash outs all over the region. We have presence in 13 uh LATAM countries and and this is very exciting because it it really allows uh people to move money seamlessly in a way that wasn't possible uh before. And one of the things that that we recently uh announced was also uh an integration with Bridge that allows every Latin American to create a US dollar bank account on their name.

uh which is uh something that uh is probably one of the most significant fintech innovations over the past decade. Uh I was uh privileged to grow in a family in a Venezuelan family that uh taught me how important was to have savings in US dollars and they opened a US dollar bank account for me when I was 18 years old. uh but and and and I was in a very very privileged position. But uh today with some of these technologies, you can actually open a bank account uh in the US on your name for free with no maintenance uh cost and and basically be able to top up this account with over 70 plus uh local payment methods. This is enabling a new wave of innovation uh in terms of how people find jobs.

Uh we are seeing uh um more and more uh freelancers and and entrepreneurs uh find jobs in in in the US and Europe and be able to receive those payments locally in Latin America. So I think that's that's pretty exciting and that's opening up uh a whole um whole new possibilities for for entrepreneurs, for freelancers, for remote workers and and so on. So uh Eldorado was a financial uh platform that was born in in Latin America. It was born thanks to my experience in in local bitcoins. And one of the uh most exciting things about peer-to-peer infrastructure is that we also uh these infrastructures also work uh thanks to uh thousands of individual liquidity providers.

These individual liquidity providers uh before they used to operate informally on WhatsApp groups, on Telegram groups and so on. But now they are able to operate uh seamlessly on a more formalized marketplace and they are also able to earn money by doing very simple buy and sell arbitrage operations. So we are innovating in the way uh people actually uh earn money. So, there are more than 5,000 individuals that earn money thanks to providing liquidity on these uh peer-to-peer markets. These are mostly young people, young Venezuelans, young Colombians, young Argentinians that they were probably involved in the in the forex business before or or for people here in Argentina, the Quuevas, and today uh they are uh providing liquidity to to market places like El Dorado.

So I think that that's uh also a very uh exciting and unique characteristic of of peer-to-peer marketplaces. So uh and and and and the next step for for these peer-to-peer marketplaces is to uh abstract all the liquidity and market making aspects of of of of these markets. So we can uh enable a true uh we we're calling it like a fiatto fiat experience. uh but uh it's a it's a horrible name for for a crypto product. Uh and and what essentially does is that it allows you to move money directly from your Colombian pesos to Brazilian rise or to US dollar without even knowing that there's uh stable coin liquidity and market making activity behind the scenes.

So I think that that's also uh pretty uh pretty important and we are able to do this in a in a self-custodial and and decentralized fashion which is also uh very important for for many of us and and and to be and to become as resilient as possible with some of these uh infrastructures. Um and uh and finally uh one of the one of the things that I I I want to highlight is that uh we are finally uh in the point that we are seeing innovation in the neo banking uh onchain space there there's plenty of people chatting about this uh new trend and we've we've been discussing this for for the past few years but we're finally getting to the point where you can have a self-custoal wallet with account abstraction, gas abstraction, uh decentralized on and offs, uh a a card attached to these uh self-custodial wallet, a virtual dollar account, a virtual euro account, and an international transfers as well. So, uh we're we're getting pretty close to a full uh NEO banking onchain experience. And I I'm very very excited uh to uh to see where that will lead us. I I believe that the next new banks of Latin America will be completely on chain.

Uh Newang is the biggest fintech, one of the biggest fintexs and the the by far the biggest neo bank in the world. But Newbang only operates in about three or four countries and and we're building solutions that will be able to serve uh millions of peoples in in emerging markets uh that will uh also help us bring financial inclusion to millions of people in in these emerging economies and that will also translate in an acceleration of of the GDP growth in many of our nations. So that's one of the things that inspire us at at Elor Dorado. And and finally and not not least uh this uh like US dollar products and and these upcoming uh u like euro uh cards and and neo bankanking products will be able uh to help us bring this super app this stable coin super app vision to to the masses in a decentralized and and resilient fashion. And my final message uh is that we need to build infrastructure and we need to build solutions that are resilient enough so that what happened in Venezuela, in Argentina, in Bolivia, in Kenya, and in many other countries in the world with hyperinflation doesn't repeat again thanks to the work of many innovators that are sharing this space.

So, thank you very much for for joining us today and and glad to talk to you uh afterwards. Thank you.