Zach Abrams, the founder of stablecoin company Bridge, admits he was surprised when the bulk of his business ended up coming from non-U.S. markets in Latin America, Europe, and Africa.
“We were very U.S.-centric. We didn’t know what the opportunities were in the Philippines, Africa, or Latin America,” Abrams says. “Unbeknownst to us, there was all this pent up demand outside the U.S. to build with stablecoins.” The firm’s first customers asked it to build cross-border payment infrastructure between the U.S. and Colombia and to facilitate payouts into countries like Venezuela and the Philippines.
Bridge’s rapid rise was driven by regions that featured high friction across borders, like Latin America. Now part of Stripe, Abrams argues that the next phase of growth could come from tokenizing non-dollar currencies.
Today’s stablecoin sector is dominated by coins denominated in the U.S. dollar, with these tokens making up over 95% of all transactions. That’s unnerved governments outside the U.S., who fear that the rise of stablecoins might reinforce the U.S. dollar’s existing dominance in global trade and financial flows.
Yet Abrams argues that U.S. dollar dominance may just reflect the immaturity of the stablecoin space. “We’re in the early stages,” Abrams says. “But in a world where more and more of our infrastructure is tokenized, it’s going to be incredibly important to have tokenized local currencies.”
