Aerial panorama of Botafogo Bay and Sugar Loaf Mountain, Rio De Janeiro, Brazil.
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Brazil has 26 million crypto holders, roughly 12% of the population, making it one of the world’s top adoption markets. Yet only 37% of Brazilian stablecoin holders have actually used them for real-world spending. The other 63% just hold.
This is crypto’s fundamental utility gap: people accumulate digital assets but can’t easily spend them without converting back to fiat, moving funds to exchanges, or sacrificing self-custody. The promise was financial self-sovereignty. The reality has been digital hoarding.
Oobit, backed by Tether and launching officially in Brazil now, claims to solve this. Its DePay feature lets users tap to pay at any merchant directly from their self-custody wallets, with no exchange transfers, no custodial intermediaries, no conversion friction. Just crypto in, fiat out at the merchant side.
The early data suggests they might be onto something. Among Oobit’s 50,000 beta users in Brazil, 92% of transaction volume comes from stablecoins, with USDT accounting for 86%. That’s significantly higher than global averages and points to genuine utility rather than speculation.
Leading the expansion is Eduardo Prota, former CEO of N26 Brazil, who watched the German neobank exit the market earlier this year. Now as Oobit’s Regional Manager for LATAM, he’s betting that stablecoin payments succeed where European neobanks failed. His thesis:
“Stablecoin payments are now where neobanks were in 2013-2014.”
Why Crypto Payments Work Now
Eduardo Prota, general manager of Oobit.
Oobit
Timing matters. When N26 launched in Brazil in 2019, crypto was regulatory toxic waste. Banks avoided it and networks like Visa and Mastercard kept their distance. Payment processors treated stablecoins like money laundering risk waiting to happen.
The political landscape has shifted that calculation, as the Trump administration’s embrace of crypto, from Bitcoin reserve proposals to appointing crypto-friendly regulators, signaled that digital assets weren’t disappearing. More importantly, it gave traditional payment rails cover to engage without reputational panic.
Suddenly Visa is processing stablecoin settlements. Mastercard is partnering with self-custody wallets. Stripe acquired Bridge for $1.1 billion to build stablecoin infrastructure. The same rails that powered neobanks now power crypto payments without the compliance anxiety that defined the previous era.
This is what Prota means by the 2013-2014 neobank comparison. Neobanks didn’t invent banking infrastructure. They leveraged existing payment rails like Visa, Mastercard and ACH with a far superior user experience. Eduardo sees stablecoin payments following the same pattern.
Why Crypto Holders Don’t Spend
The original crypto ethos demands self-custody: not your keys, not your coins. But this principle created unexpected friction between holding and spending. Moving crypto from a wallet to an exchange, converting to fiat, trusting custodians with your funds, each step added barriers, friction and risk.
The result: crypto became something you hoard rather than spend. The harder it is to use, the more it resembles gold bars in a safe rather than cash in a wallet.
There are various existing solutions that attempt to solve this. On one hand, exchanges like Coinbase offer debit cards, such as the Coinbase Card. But exchanges primarily make money when you trade your funds, not when you spend them. So incentives aren’t clearly aligned. A closer competitor is the MetaMask Card, which maintains self-custody, but is primarily a physical card.
Oobit’s approach is software-only. Connect MetaMask or Trust Wallet to the app, tap at checkout like Apple Pay, and the merchant receives fiat instantly. Your crypto never leaves your custody until the moment of purchase. No physical card required. No moving funds to a custodial platform first.
Prota’s background informs this strategy. N26 tried becoming a neobank in Brazil and failed, ultimately exiting the market in 2025 as part of a broader European refocus. Oobit operates as payment infrastructure rather than a bank, potentially sidestepping the regulatory burdens that sank traditional neobanks. More critically, it launches in an environment where payment processors actually want to touch stablecoins, something impossible five years ago.
Brazil As Testing Ground For Crypto Payments
Brazil is structurally ideal for proving stablecoin utility.
The payment flow tells the story. Remote workers getting paid via platforms like Remote.com in USDC or USDT now have a direct spending mechanism. The fact that 86% of Oobit’s transaction volume is specifically USDT shows it isn’t speculation-driven trading. To a great extent its people receiving stablecoin wages and actually using them for daily purchases.
Brazil’s central bank backed Pix instant payment system jumpstarted the digitalisation of payments. Pix killed cash, dropping usage from 43% in 2019 to just 6% in 2024. It normalized the expectation of frictionless digital payments. Oobit doesn’t compete with Pix, but it can leverage those same tap-to-pay expectations that Pix established.
The comparison to Remote.com’s stablecoin payout announcement earlier this year shows the loop closing. Workers receive stablecoin wages through platforms like Remote. Oobit lets them spend those earnings without converting to Brazilian Real first. For people facing currency instability or capital controls, that matters significantly.
Does Self-Custody Actually Matter For Crypto Payments?
Bitso has established scale across Latin America. Nubank, a world-leading neobank, claims over 90 million customers. Binance has global reach and brand recognition. All three offer crypto payment features. All three require custody of user funds.
So why does self-custody matter if custodial solutions work?
Prota’s answer centers on trust breakdown. FTX collapsed. Celsius froze withdrawals. Custody skepticism among crypto holders is real and rational. The target user wants dollar-denominated asset exposure through USDT without trusting another intermediary institution to hold it after watching repeated custody failures.
This mirrors the thesis from MetaMask’s card launch earlier this year. Simon Jones at Baanx, which powers that card, called the model “non-custodial neobanking.” Oobit represents the Latin American execution of that same thesis: users want both convenience and control, and technology can finally deliver both simultaneously.
On the other hand, others argue that mainstream users may not care about custody philosophy. They trust Nubank and Coinbase the same way they trust traditional banks. Most people don’t run their own email servers either. Convenience typically beats ideology for mass markets.
Oobit’s bet is that enough Brazilians care, especially if the non-custodial user experience is delightful enough.
What Happens Next In Brazilian Crypto Payments
Brazil’s 26 million crypto holders finally have infrastructure that matches the self-custody ethos without sacrificing usability. The 50,000 beta users spending primarily in USDT suggest genuine product-market fit rather than speculative experimentation.
If Prota’s comparison holds up, if stablecoin payments in 2025 truly mirror neobanks circa 2013-2014, then Brazil looks like the United Kingdom in 2015: early innings of fundamental infrastructure change that will take years to fully play out. But the real catalyst isn’t just technology improvement. It’s regulatory acceptance. Visa and Mastercard processing stablecoin transactions makes this technically possible. The shift in political and regulatory climate makes it commercially permissible.
Stablecoins will become an integral part of consumer spending. Between Oobit, MetaMask Card, Stripe and others, that’s the infrastructure is happening across multiple implementations. The real question is whether users will trade some convenience for custody control when the convenience gap narrows to nearly zero.
Oobit is betting the answer is yes.
