Stablecoin payments on local rails

Millions of people across Latin America hold digital dollars but struggle to spend them where they actually live. Local merchants accept instant-payment rails like Pix, not stablecoins. I led the 0→1 product that closed that gap: pay any local QR or Pix request straight from a USDC balance, with the currency conversion handled instantly in the background.

A local-payments product that lets users pay merchants by scanning a QR code, or in Brazil a Pix key, directly from their USDC balance. The stablecoin is converted to local currency in real time and settled to the merchant. Launched across three markets (Brazil, Argentina, Bolivia), supporting both first- and third-party payments.

I owned the product end-to-end as Senior PM, with a team of ~8 (backend, frontend, design): partner selection and integration, pricing, specification, metrics and dashboards, rollout, and in-production monitoring. The design principle was simple. A crypto-to-fiat payment had to feel like an ordinary local transaction. The user scans and pays; the conversion and settlement happen instantly and invisibly.

Every market runs on different instant-payment rails and QR standards, with a real-time currency conversion sitting in the middle of each transaction. The real product problem wasn’t the integration. It was keeping all of that complexity invisible, so paying with stablecoins matched what users already expected from a local payment.