Part Eight: Apparently I Did It Wrong

This is Part Eight! The very last chapter of the eight-part series: Can I Pay With This: A stablecoin experiment in Buenos Aires (finally!). Thank you to the Ethereum Foundation and the EV Mavericks for their support, without which this experiment could never have happened.

Table of Contents

Part One: Decentralized or Destitute <-- New? Start here.
Money, monkeys and mild terror

Part Two: First Contact with Reality
KYC on a hostel bunk bed

Part Three: WE ACCEPT BITCOIN (sort of)
Worst title for an Ethereum subreddit ever

Part Four: Eighteen Ways to Pay for Ice Cream
Stablecoins, FX hell and a missing keyboard

Part Five: Going Bankless
From tourist shop hack to cueva contact

Part Six: Trustless, My Ass
Trading with the Blue Man

Part Seven: Custodial Services
Self-custody is easy, luggage custody is hard

Part Eight: Apparently I Did It Wrong <-- You are here
"You should have just used X, bro."

When I get back to Buenos Aires, suddenly everyone is talking about crypto adoption. It's a week before the conference and people are exchanging tips. "You can trade USDT for pesos at any exchange," people tell me knowingly.

"Where, exactly?"

Not a single one of them is able to give me a location. There are exchange houses, they say with a bit of hand waving. Just look for USDT stickers on the window along with the dollar and euro currency symbols. When I point out that I've been here for three weeks and not seen a single one, I'm told it's because I was staying in the wrong part of Buenos Aires. "Go to Palermo, they are everywhere."

I go to Palermo. They are definitely not everywhere. I ask at an exchange, in case there just isn't a sign. No: no cripto. I ask other conference goers if they've seen any exchanges that take USDT. No one has. A few days later, one person in the conference Telegram group sends a photograph of an exchange that takes USDT. Success! The sign is explicit though: TRON only. I don't bother visiting.

At the cypherpunk conference, I speak to a Buenos Aires resident who refuses to do KYC on principle. I can't think of another city where you could exist without KYC. But when I point out how complicated I've found it to trade stablecoins for cash, he is surprised. Initially he says that the exchanges are everywhere but accepts my lived experience, that I never found a single one. He laughs when I tell him how frightened I was to meet with Blue. It's perfectly safe, he tells me. And yes, delivering the money through a man on a motorbike is common, although he concedes that maybe not on the first trade. But for visitors to the country, foreigners, doesn't he think that it's a bigger risk? I feel like even asking the question is making myself a target.

"That's what community is for," he tells me. "You ask your friends, you get told where to go."

Friends? Not only do I have to dodge scammers, guard seed phrases and pretend I understand half the apps I'm using. Now I have to have friends?

OK... I do have friends, technically. But the Venn diagram of "people who like me", "people who use crypto" and "people who understand Argentina's financial underworld" is just three circles in the shape of a snowman.

He takes a bit of a breath, as if summoning patience, and tells me that the point is to trust the community. Ask on Twitter!

Twitter? That same Twitter that told me I don't need cash in Buenos Aires? That's who he thinks I should ask? He agrees that maybe Twitter isn't the best example of a web of trust. But really, trading with someone like Blue is very safe, he tells me, and borderline accuses me of having trust issues.

He might have a point.

A herd of new payment apps explodes onto the scene in the week leading up to the conference. I keep putting $20 into each app's wallet and hoping I remember to pull it all back out at the end. I pay using stablecoin cards and QR payment systems all over the city.

Most of these allow me to pay in stablecoins while the vendor receives pesos. One very clever app pushes daily updates as they on-board restaurants all over the city, allowing the merchant to receive my stablecoins directly, without conversion. By the time I leave Buenos Aires, they've signed up over two dozen cafés and restaurants. The first QR-payment app that I installed has a big breakthrough during the conference: integration with a set of ATMs allowing the user to withdraw cash. Another QR-based app ticks all my boxes: they connect me directly to buyers; I tell them how many USDT I need to pay my bill and once someone agrees to the purchase, I scan the QR code and they pay the merchant on my behalf. There's no KYC and no permission needed, just an online marketplace which works amazingly well. Meanwhile, all conference attendees are given a newbie-friendly wallet built into the Devconnect app, which allows them to pay for everything at the conference using stablecoins or crypto, no need for pesos at all.

These innovative approaches can only flourish in certain environments. Someone commented that Buenos Aires was perfectly positioned to be Ground Zero for crypto adoption. I agree. Maybe stablecoins aren’t a revolution here, but they are already accepted as another tool in the box.

The big difference was that my community had arrived. Devconnect 2025 had brought thousands of people to a conference hall in Buenos Aires to talk about exactly these problems and to offer solutions.

Obviously, physical exchanges that take USDT do exist. Once you find one, never again will you have to peer into shop windows looking like an orphan on Christmas Eve. There's an active P2P community centered around Binance. Motorbike couriers with envelopes of money are apparently an accepted part of local finance, even if I declined to partake. People don't flinch when you mention crypto.

That's more than I can say for my hometown.

Whatever comes next won’t be clean or ideological. It’ll look like Buenos Aires: improvised, relentless, and somehow functioning against the odds.

In the end, I proved that it is possible to deal with day-to-day life using stablecoins, if not in a wholly decentralized and permissionless manner. With more local knowledge, I could mostly live on stablecoins without KYC, by converting to cash and being choosy about which shops and restaurants I frequented.

No, the people of Buenos Aires do not use stablecoins for transactions on a daily basis. There is clearly very little mainstream adoption of crypto payments. Right now, the main advantage of stablecoin apps and payment systems in Buenos Aires is that last-minute conversion to traditional rails and pesos.

But even that is a jump forward. The infrastructure exists. The current regulatory space allows for experimentation. People are already aware of the benefits of holding savings in stablecoin. The QR payment system is standardized, waiting to be plugged into. Developers are building, not debating whether to start.

Call it early adoption, call it survival instinct. Whatever it is, Buenos Aires is ready long before anyone else is. Right now, they are not using Ethereum for their financial freedom. But they could.

Buenos Aires isn’t running on stablecoins yet. But if any city decides to, it’ll be this one.

This was an EVMavericks production.