How Nubank Is Expanding Globally Through Stablecoins

Expansion: Last week, Nubank, Latin America’s largest digital bank, launched Nu Global, a stablecoin-based multicurrency account for customers in more than 35 countries, with an initial focus on corridors between Europe and Latin America. Instead of local bank accounts, it holds customer money in Circle's dollar and euro stablecoins, USDC and EURC, and adds free transfers and a virtual Mastercard for global spending on top.

• Global scale: Founded in 2013, Nubank serves more than 140 million customers across Brazil, Mexico and Colombia, making it one of the world’s largest neobanks alongside Revolut, which serves more than 80 million.

Why it matters: Until now, Nubank expanded market by market, securing local licenses before growing customers and building products. Nu Global offers a faster route: a common stablecoin infrastructure can support transfers and spending across dozens of markets without replicating the full banking stack in each one. That lets Nubank establish customer relationships first, test demand, and invest in local licenses and broader banking products where traction proves durable.

• "Once we establish a presence and begin building customer relationships, we can assess the demand in each market," founder and CEO David Vélez said in an interview. "That then allows us to build a banking business, do credit, do investments, do payments, as we have in all of our core markets as well."

How it works: Nu Global owns the customer relationship, app and product experience, while Sygnum provides the regulated banking and digital-asset infrastructure that connects the product to fiat and crypto markets. The two platforms are integrated through APIs.

• "Under the hood, we handle fiat and FX capabilities, the execution of fiat-to-crypto or crypto-to-crypto transactions, access to USDC and EURC, as well as settlement and custody," Fritz W. Jost, Sygnum’s Chief B2B Officer, told Blockstories.

A broader playbook: The underlying structure is not unique to Nubank. A growing group of infrastructure providers now offer comparable building blocks through APIs. Stripe’s Bridge lets fintechs embed stablecoin wallets, conversion and payment rails, while providers such as BVNK and zerohash offer related infrastructure connecting fiat and stablecoin balances with functions including trading, custody, account funding, payments and settlement.

• The banking difference: Where Sygnum’s banking license adds another layer is customer protection. While customers do not hold accounts at Sygnum directly, they have a contractual claim against Nu Global for their account balance. That claim is covered by a bank default guarantee from Sygnum, meaning that if Nu Global becomes insolvent, customers can assert a direct claim against Sygnum for the covered amount.

Traditional U.S. market entry: Nu Global is only one of Nubank’s two routes abroad. On the same day, the company also outlined a more conventional U.S. expansion: launching through Lead Bank while preparing to operate under its own license after receiving conditional OCC approval for a national bank charter in January. Once live, Nubank plans to offer deposits, credit cards and lending directly.

• What stablecoins don't solve: The U.S. launch shows where the stablecoin model reaches its limits, particularly around credit. Nubank says credit accounts for more than 70% of the global consumer-banking profit pool, but lending remains far more locally constrained than holding and moving money, requiring local regulation and access to credit data.

Outlook: For now, Nubank is expanding the lighter layer first. Transfer links with Brazil, Mexico, Colombia and the U.S. are planned for the coming months, connecting Nu Global to its 140 million existing customers. Nubank also plans to add products such as tokenized assets, while demand through Nu Global will help determine which markets become its fifth, sixth and seventh countries for deeper regulated expansion.

Matt Larson is Chief Growth Officer at Velocity, an enterprise payments and treasury platform that combines stablecoins with traditional banking rails.

How will stablecoins enable fintechs to compete globally rather than locally, and what will separate those that can scale from those that cannot?

Stablecoins and public blockchains allow fintechs to assemble a broad financial offering much faster than before. Rather than establishing separate relationships with banks, brokers and other intermediaries for every product, they can use permissionless infrastructure as a back-end to combine global payments, dollar- or euro-denominated balances, yield and tokenized assets within a single interface. This allows them to launch more independently and serve multiple markets from day one.

But this model also has clear limits. Services such as regulated banking products or domestic money transfers still depend on local licenses, partnerships and compliance with requirements such as KYB and the Travel Rule. This is why I describe the model as “global in the middle and local around the edges.”

As a result, the harder advantage to replicate will increasingly lie in these local capabilities: securing licenses, bringing products in-house, broadening the offering and earning the trust of customers beyond the crypto-native market.

Ariel Eiberman leads Global Fintech Research & Development at Gnosis Pay, an infrastructure provider for fintechs and wallets looking to launch their own branded crypto card programs.

As stablecoin infrastructure lowers the barriers to offering financial services, how will the fintech landscape evolve, and which players are best positioned to win?

Stablecoin accounts, cards, payments and basic money movement will increasingly become table stakes. Competition will push fees, swap spreads and yield-sharing margins lower, making scale increasingly important.

As those revenue streams compress, fintechs will increasingly look toward higher-margin products. The clearest next revenue pool is credit, including unsecured lending, credit cards, instalments and buy-now-pay-later products. But the more interesting opportunity may lie beyond simply replicating the traditional banking stack.

Stablecoin infrastructure makes it easier to embed financial services into products that already own a customer relationship. Payroll platforms, remittance providers, super apps, retailers or even communities can add wallets, balances and payments without becoming traditional banks first. Over time, this could produce more specialized financial experiences built around particular users, lifestyles or communities rather than another generic banking app.

That means the winners may be those with enough scale to monetize low-margin payments, a profitable credit engine, or a differentiated customer relationship that makes banking a feature of something larger.

Global through stablecoin rails
Illustration: Blockstories