Nubank expands crypto services as stablecoin use surges across Latin America

Brazilian digital bank Nubank reportedly aims to add support for dollar-pegged stablecoins and credit card payments. The shift was announced by the bank’s vice-chairman and former governor of Brazil’s central bank, Roberto Campos Neto. Addressing the Meridian 2025 event yesterday, he discussed blockchain’s role in linking digital assets and traditional banking.

The local media quoted Campos Neto as saying Nubank would soon start testing stablecoin payments with its credit cards in what it sees as a broader attempt to connect digital assets into mainstream banking.

The data reveals that people aren’t buying for transactions, they’re buying as a store of value,’ he was quoted as saying. “We need to get to the bottom of why this is happening. I think it’s shifting a little bit, but we have to be aware of it.”

He also noted that the challenge for banks is finding a way to accept deposits in tokenized forms and use these assets to issue credit for clients.

Nubank expands crypto services as stablecoin use surges across Latin America

Founded in São Paulo in 2013, Nubank is a Brazilian digital bank serving over 100 million customers across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia. The bank entered the digital asset space in 2022 by allocating 1% of its net assets to Bitcoin and rolling out crypto trading for its customers.

In March 2025, Nubank broadened its crypto lineup by adding four altcoins, giving customers access to Cardano, Cosmos, Near Protocol, and Algorand.

Stablecoin adoption is surging across Latin America. In Brazil, the president of the Central Bank revealed at a Bank for International Settlements event in February that 90% of crypto activity in the country is tied to stablecoins.

Dollar-pegged digital assets are also gaining traction in Argentina, where inflation has surpassed 100% in recent years. A March 2025 report from Bitso showed that USDT and USDC accounted for 50% and 22% of all cryptocurrency purchases in Argentina in 2024, respectively. Across Bitso’s platforms in the region, stablecoins represented 39% of all crypto purchases that year.

Adoption is spreading to other countries as well. In July 2025, the Central Bank of Bolivia signed an agreement with El Salvador to promote crypto as a “viable and reliable alternative” to fiat. Since lifting its crypto ban in June 2024, Bolivian banks have been permitted to process Bitcoin and stablecoin transactions.

In Venezuela, where inflation reached 229% in May, stablecoins such as USDT are increasingly replacing the bolívar in everyday transactions, from groceries to salaries. Chainalysis data indicates that stablecoins accounted for 47% of all crypto transactions under $10,000 in 2024.

Nu Holdings sees profit soar 42% as Nubank shifts focus

Nu Holdings, the parent company of Brazilian digital lender Nubank, reported a 42% year-on-year rise in net profit on a foreign exchange-neutral basis on Thursday, sending its shares up more than 8% in after-hours trading.

The company, which has 123 million clients in Brazil — its core market — Colombia, and Mexico, made a second-quarter net profit of $637 million for the three months to June. Revenue was $3.7 billion, a 40% increase from the previous year.

In an interview, the company’s chief financial officer, Guilherme Lago, said the profit increase resulted from operational leverage and top-line growth, but that factors underpinning that increase were beginning to shift.

“If in the last three to five years a lot of our growth has come from adding new customers, in the next three to five years, much more of our revenue growth in Brazil will come from deepening the relationship with those customers,” Lago said.

Nubank’s annualized return on equity, a measure of profitability, settled at 28%, compared to the year-earlier figure reported.

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