Local reports indicate that while the central bank maintains a ban on banks offering crypto services, two banking holding groups are preparing to offer digital peso stablecoin alternatives for businesses that would take advantage of the perks associated with programmable money.
Key Takeaways
BIND and Petersen Groups are developing peso-pegged stablecoins to offer programmable money to institutions.Subsidiaries lead the projects to bypass a 2022 central bank ban on private banks offering crypto services.These digital pesos aim to streamline institutional treasury management and collateralized credit operations.While dollar-pegged stablecoins, like USDC and USDT, are popular in Argentina as dollar proxies, local stablecoins are in the sights of fintech companies.
Petersen Group, which also owns several regional banks, would be developing the second initiative through a subsidiary with the support of Lirium, a company providing crypto-as-a-service solutions for Banco Galicia and Brubank. This offering, named DIPE, has already matured and has its own whitepaper.
The key target of these offerings would be the institutional sector, which would benefit from the smart properties of a digital peso for payments. The use cases for these initiatives would include treasury management operations, payments conditioned to an onchain event, and collateralized credit management.
While decentralized peso alternatives are already available, these offerings would have the support of banking groups behind them, with the possibility of escalating their use to private banks in the future, as the central bank is reportedly mulling lifting the ban on crypto offerings.
Nonetheless, in March, the argt peso stablecoin was targeted by the national securities regulator, which stressed that it constituted a security being offered without due compliance.
