2025-12-02 02:23:42

What will you do when the coin falls 30% in one day?

The answer given by Argentinians is: no longer trusting the local currency.

When the monthly inflation rate exceeds 200%, keeping money in the wallet is just watching it evaporate. So they turned to stablecoins—not out of faith in decentralization, but purely to survive.

Now, over 61% of Argentinians use stablecoins daily. It's not for speculating; they are really using it to buy coffee, pay rent, and issue salaries.

More than 6,000 street shops across the country specialize in one thing: helping you exchange your pesos for USDT, or vice versa. Some convenience stores have QR codes directly posted next to the cash register; scan it, settle the bill with a stablecoin, and it will arrive in 3 seconds.

This is not a science fiction scenario. This is survival wisdom forced out.

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**Stablecoin Wallet = The Bank Account of the New Era?**

For many ordinary people in Argentina, a stablecoin wallet is their "main account".

The logic is very simple:
- Store the local currency? Wait for it to devalue.
- Store stablecoins? At least today's 100 coins will still be 100 coins tomorrow.

Currently, there are 5 million people using USD-pegged stablecoins to pay for daily expenses. Behind this is a complete set of localized payment infrastructure: payment gateways automatically exchange, merchants receive funds in real-time, all within less than 3 seconds.

There are no complex technologies or high-end narratives. It is a financial system that the common people have figured out and can use.

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**Street Currency Exchange Shops: A Gray Industry Chain Forced into Existence**

Those inconspicuous "U exchange shops" on the streets of Argentina are surprisingly doing great business.

The daily revenue of a single store can reach $20,000, with a profit margin of between 8% and 10%. At the end of the year, the net profit is even higher than that of local bank branches.

Why is it so profitable?

Because the demand is too strong. People need a place to quickly and securely exchange the pesos that may depreciate at any time for "hard currency." And traditional banks? Either the fees are high or they don't provide this service at all.

So the people built this system themselves. It's not perfect, but it works.

(To be continued...)

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FreeMinter

· 12-05 02:23

Argentina has basically turned stablecoins into a daily necessity—truly incredible. Nobody trusts the peso, USDT has become the real hard currency, and banks are getting outcompeted by small street shops, haha.

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liquiditea_sipper

· 12-03 04:45

Seriously, looking at what Argentina is doing makes me think: we used to say Web3 was going to revolutionize finance, but in reality, people don’t care about the ideals of decentralization at all. They only use stablecoins when they’re pushed to the brink. That’s the most genuine use case. A small street shop with a monthly turnover of $20,000? Making more than a bank? This business model is truly incredible—the demand is definitely there.

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MevTears

· 12-02 02:53

Wait, this is real adoption, not some numbers blown up by a foundation.

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DisillusiionOracle

· 12-02 02:52

This is the true portrayal of doomsday economics, with Argentina becoming the world's largest stablecoin laboratory. To put it simply, people abandon their local currency not because they believe in Blockchain, but purely because the government has pushed them to the edge of a cliff. Imagine this: your salary is paid today, and by the end of the month, half of it has evaporated. This sense of despair cannot be expressed in numbers. The QR code payment at street stalls arrives in 3 seconds... what kind of Web3 revolution is this? This is the brutal growth after a systemic collapse. The fact that 5 million people use stablecoins is the most ironic reality—people have voted with their feet.

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PhantomMiner