“If you look at DeFi, it's all backwards. In emerging markets, people save in dollars. You go into Morpho or Aave and you put your collateral in and you borrow dollars. But in emerging markets, people save in dollars. They should use that as collateral. … So that's why we also need these local stablecoins on chain, so that we can flip this and be useful for people in emerging markets.”
Bankless · Crypto & Web3 · November 2026
Context
Serrano was listing use cases for local-currency stablecoins. He argues DeFi lending is built the wrong way round for people who hold dollars but spend and owe in local currency.
Transcript
…five, 10 minutes. You do that. Let's say you're a Brazilian. At the end of that five, 10 minutes of onboarding, you finally see a PIX ID. You send a thousand Rails and then you end up buying it or USDC or UZT. And you now have 950 in it. So your first experience using crypto is losing money. Yeah.
…really frequently have not solved. If I want to fund a non-custodial wallet, the KYC process is completely borked. Like one in 10 chance that I get it correct. And then if I do get it correct, to your point, I'm paying an astronomical amount of fees just to have that money served to me immediately.
Yeah, so you pay FX and spreads. You want to go back, you pay again. So you now end up with 900. So how do we fix that? And we started to think, well, we need to fix this. And how do we fix this? And we saw, well, first we need to make the onboarding one-to-one. So the user has to pay zero fees on the onboarding. And then we need to make it a deposit on chain. Like it has to be the local representation. So the user can go and click deposit, do the onboarding, get the pix ID. They send a thousand Rails and they had to get a thousand Rails on chain. And that's why we said, well, and then build a business model around managing the float so that we can subsidize the RAMs and be a cost so that we can do it frictionless. So that way the user can be on an on par experience with a fintech. Like it's like the same experience they have on Nubank or Mercado Pabo or Brevolud, like deposit, send a thousand Rails, have a thousand Rails, and a thousand pesos, have a thousand pesos. And then that was the initial trigger. But then we thought, well, like when we started, when we launched it, immediately, Sees really good conversion rates. It is growing really fast. It's like AUM is…
trying to be defensive, to put your point earlier. They're being defensive with their capital rather than speculative.
So they should put USDC or UCT as collateral and they should be borrowing local currency. But to be able to borrow local currency from a DeFi protocol, we need the representation of the local currency on chain. So that's why we also need these local stablecoins on chain so that we can flip this and…
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