TruBit CEO Maggie Wu: Latin America is a natural fertile ground for cryptocurrencies

Here is the English translation: Source: Xiaguang Social Latin America, this distant foreign land full of magical realism, is now becoming the natural fertile ground for the burgeoning cryptocurrency industry. Latin America, currently in an economic upswing, has a rising middle class and booming consumption, but the traditional financial supply is scarce and unable to meet the demand. Therefore, the fintech entrepreneurial boom in inclusive finance is thriving at the right time. On the other hand, many Latin American countries are experiencing severe inflation and frequent exchange rate fluctuations, while the influx of foreign capital and enterprises has driven strong cross-border payment demand. Based on this, using Bit technology to process transactions and settlements between different currencies has gradually become a pressing need. In 2017, the Chinese entrepreneur Maggie Wu, who went all-in on the Bit cryptocurrency industry, precisely captured this business opportunity. In early 2020, Maggie Wu and her team established the brand TruBit in Latin America - a compliant digital currency platform that integrates a wallet (TruBit), a trading platform (TruBit Pro), and a business payment platform (TruBit Business). Since its establishment, TruBit has obtained VASP licenses in Mexico, Argentina, and Peru, connected with local banks, and enabled the conversion between Bit and fiat currencies. Now, TruBit has become the platform with the most Bit licenses and fiat currency deposits and withdrawals in Latin America, and has not experienced any security incidents in its four years of operation. Today, decentralized financial services have become an important development trend in Global Fintech. TruBit is starting from Latin America and exploring the possibilities of the global market step by step. Recently, Xiaguang Social had an in-depth exchange with Maggie Wu on the development status and future opportunities of the Latin American fintech market. The following is a summary of Maggie Wu's views: - Representing Latin American countries, Mexico is becoming a new emerging manufacturing center under the global supply chain restructuring and the "nearshoring" policy of the United States. More and more companies from around the world are setting up operations in Latin America, and the import and export trade volume between them and Latin America is also increasing year by year, driving the booming cross-border payment demand. However, the banking system in Latin America is relatively backward, with 26% of the population still without bank accounts, slow capital circulation, and countries like Argentina facing severe exchange rate crises. On the third day of taking office, the new President of Argentina, Milei, sharply devalued the Argentine peso by more than 50% to 1 USD to 800 pesos, and will maintain a 2% stable devaluation every month thereafter. In this case, companies expanding overseas need stablecoins as an intermediary for asset transactions and settlements, and Bit technology provides this option. Whether it is Bit payment or cross-border transactions, this is what TruBit is currently doing, which significantly saves on high commission costs and time costs. - From the perspective of the Bit industry in Latin America, in terms of holdings or comprehensive trading, Latin America is still ranked among the top globally, with more than 50 million people holding Bit. The Bit markets in Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and Venezuela are quite strong and diversified. Especially in Argentina, the stablecoin market is in a leading position in the Latin American region. According to the "2024 Bit Geography Report" released by the Bit analysis agency Chainalysis, the share of stablecoin transactions in Argentina is 61.8%, slightly higher than Brazil's 59.8%, and far higher than the global average of 44.7%. Although compared to the world's largest Bit market, the United States, the Latin American market as a whole is still a niche market and has not yet reached a larger scale, but compared to other countries globally, the Latin American market is already quite active. One of the most watched Bit conferences, the Ethereum Developer Conference, also chose to be held in Latin America in 2022, in the Colombian capital Bogotá, with Ethereum founder Vitalik Buterin personally attending. - Latin America's current economic development momentum is indeed quite good, with local people's wages also rising, driving the prosperity of the consumer market. And Latin Americans are very willing to consume, with family structures mostly being multi-generational, and Latin Americans spending almost all their money on family daily needs, with almost no savings habits. From the consumer demand perspective, there is indeed a strong tendency for borrowing and consumption in advance; but from the perspective of traditional financial institutions, most of the banks in Latin America are European and American banks such as Citibank, BBVA, and HSBC, but these institutions mainly serve high-end users and have no motivation to update their services to cover more income groups and promote inclusive finance. The huge gap between demand and supply has made the fintech track in Latin America full of potential. 80% of the top 10 unicorn companies in Latin America are fintech companies, accounting for 70% of the total market value. - In addition to the strong consumer demand and the lack of financial service supply, Latin America itself also has some economic foundations and business environment for fintech startups. First, Latin America has a large population base of 650 million, with a per capita GDP of over $10,000, not much different from China; secondly, the Internet penetration rate here is relatively high, and the official attitude towards Bit is relatively friendly; and countries like Brazil and Argentina also have relatively strict foreign exchange control policies, with very serious inflation, so settlement through stablecoins has become a pressing need. This is a market where the demand and pain points are very obvious, but doing fintech in Latin America not only faces challenges in language, but also needs to meet regulatory compliance requirements, and requires a knowledge system in law, technology, and finance, which is quite demanding for entrepreneurs. Therefore, Latin American fintech is still a blue ocean market. - Overall, there are still very few Chinese background entrepreneurs doing Fintech startups in Latin America, with the larger ones being Stori and TruBit, and the rest are mostly financial lending companies expanding to Latin America. Currently, the competition in the Latin American small and micro-lending market is already very fierce, as this industry has relatively low barriers to entry and competitive barriers. The main forces in the Latin American startup ecosystem are basically composed of two groups: one is Latin Americans born and raised in the United States, who have obtained venture capital from Silicon Valley or Wall Street, and have returned to Latin America to start businesses, with a relatively high success rate, as they have replicated the business models that have been validated in the United States to Latin America, and have some advantages compared to local Latin American entrepreneurs; the other is prominent families in Latin America. But Chinese entrepreneurs are not within these two systems, so it is basically those who have had previous entrepreneurial experience or have worked for top American fintech companies, who will venture into the Latin American fintech track, but the real people doing this can be counted on one's fingers. In the past, when remitting money from a Chinese bank account to any overseas bank account, a code called the Swift Code had to be filled out, and it might take two to three days or even five to six days for the money to arrive, because the entire process required a large number of intermediaries to confirm. But now, with stablecoins based on Bit technology, the time efficiency has been greatly shortened. And the annual transaction amount of Swift is more than the global GDP, so even if only 0.1% of the transactions are settled using the Bit method, this is still a trillion-dollar scale. Today, decentralized financial services have become a global fintech entrepreneurial trend. In this general trend, at the beginning of this year, TruBit announced its official entry into the Asian market, and its exploration of its global strategic layout is still ongoing.