When we founded Transfero in 2018 and launched BRZ and ARZ, the first stablecoins in Latin America, the question on every call was: can stablecoins actually move money faster and cheaper than the banking system? Eight years later, that question is answered. Yes, they can. Institutional users moving hundreds of millions of dollars per month across corridors like LatAm to Asia know this firsthand.
But this victory, real as it is, has obscured a bigger question. What makes global commerce work is not just that money moves. It is that credit moves alongside it.
The quiet engine of the global economy
An importer in São Paulo does not wire $2 million to a supplier in Shenzhen and hope the goods arrive. A letter of credit from a bank sits between them, financing the gap between shipment and payment. An exporter in Lima does not wait 90 days to get paid. A factoring line funds the receivable at day five. A shipping line does not operate without trade finance structures underneath it.
Trade finance, in its various forms, is the connective tissue. It is worth over $5 trillion annually. And it remains almost entirely outside the stablecoin stack.
Why this gap is the real opportunity
Settlement infrastructure on stablecoins is a commodity. We already compete on spreads, corridors, and uptime, as we should. But the transformative product is not faster settlement. It is finance that works at the speed of settlement.
Imagine a trade cycle where:
- A receivable originated this morning in Mexico City is funded by institutional liquidity providers in Singapore before the close of business.
- An importer in Buenos Aires accesses short-dated credit against a verified shipment, priced transparently, repaid automatically upon delivery.
- A payment service provider in Jakarta plugs directly into trade finance vaults rather than depending on a legacy correspondent bank's credit line.
Each of these is technically possible today. What is missing is the institutional-grade infrastructure that makes it routine.
Stablecoins solved cross-border payments. They have not solved FX or trade finance. That is the work ahead, and that is what Bloquo is building.
Why now
Three conditions have converged:
- Institutional liquidity holds structural stablecoin balances. There is real capital on-chain looking for yield tied to real economic activity, not speculation.
- Regulatory frameworks are catching up. MiCA in Europe, clearer guidance in the US, and maturing regimes across LatAm and Asia make it possible to structure trade finance products that institutional counterparties can actually hold.
- Tokenization primitives are ready. Wrapping real-world assets like trade receivables on-chain is no longer experimental. It is operational.
What we are doing about it
Bloquo Finance, which we launched earlier this year, is our first serious effort to close this gap. Tokenized vaults backed by real trade receivables. Institutional-only access. Short-dated, corridor-specific, transparent. It is a small start. It is the right start.
The thesis is simple. Stablecoin infrastructure that unifies cross-border payments, FX, and trade finance in one stack unlocks more economic activity than any of those layers can unlock alone. That is the commerce problem. That is the problem worth solving.
There is no commerce without credit. There is no global commerce without credit at global scale. Anyone building stablecoin infrastructure without reckoning with this is, I think, missing the actual opportunity.