On Sunday, October 26, 2025, Argentina was holding legislative elections, and not much was happening at Ripio. Sebastián Serrano remembers it more vividly: “Tumbleweeds were rolling.”
A few weeks earlier, the company had tokenized AL30, Argentina’s most actively traded sovereign bond. That meant it could continue being bought and sold on blockchain even when the stock exchange was closed. Election Sunday was a good opportunity to find out whether that capability had a practical use or was merely a technical possibility.
For much of the afternoon, it looked as though the answer would be the latter. Only around six o’clock, when the first results began to emerge, did activity pick up. AL30 started trading heavily and reached Monday with a market price already formed before the traditional market opened.
Until then, during an election weekend, anyone trying to follow financial sentiment in real time had essentially one reference: the crypto dollar. That night, another appeared. An Argentine bond was trading on a Sunday.
That is where much of Ripio’s current strategy is heading. The company was founded in 2013 around Bitcoin, but over the years it added bonds, local currencies, credit, and technology for other companies. Today, it says it reaches more than 24 million users across eight countries.
Serrano has been there for almost the entire evolution of crypto as an industry. He saw Bitcoin reach prices that once seemed impossible and then lose much of its value, huge companies disappear in a matter of days, and international competitors arrive in Latin America with plans that proved far harder to execute once they were on the ground.
Now he believes another crypto winter may be approaching. He has already lived through four of them, and precisely because he has seen them up close, he does not think this one will necessarily unfold in the same way.
Choele Choel
Long before Bitcoin, there was Choele Choel.
Serrano grew up in that city in Río Negro, where his parents had bought a small farm. At eight, he found a computer magazine and became fascinated by the subject. He kept asking for a computer at home until they eventually got one.
Years later, he helped set up the city’s first internet provider. He then moved to La Plata to study Physics. After three years, he realized he wanted to take another path and switched to Systems Analysis.
In 2007, he started a software development company. They began working from Argentina and eventually landed projects for Silicon Valley startups. That connection also led him to live in the United States.
He started paying attention to Bitcoin in 2012. At the time, it was still far from being an everyday topic in banks, investment funds, or financial media. Outside certain technology circles, it remained something fairly strange.
A year later, he founded the company that would eventually become Ripio.
The name came from the gravel roads of Patagonia. Ripio is the stone that makes a road passable when it would otherwise be difficult to travel. The image worked well for what they wanted to do: make a technology that was still difficult for most people to access much easier to use.
At first, that technology was Bitcoin. Over time came bonds, credit, and local currencies. The business expanded considerably, but that original idea remained.
A Different Cycle
In the latest cycle, there was one thing Serrano expected that never appeared with the same intensity as before.
Euphoria.
Bitcoin reached new highs, ETFs arrived, regulation advanced in the United States, and large funds began buying consistently. A few years earlier, any one of those developments would have seemed extraordinary.
What did not appear in the same way was a massive influx of small investors.
In previous cycles, there came a point when many people bought simply because they were afraid of missing out. There was a sense that any crypto-related asset could keep rising and nobody wanted to arrive too late.
Serrano expected something similar this time. It did not happen, at least not with the same force.
For him, another moment was far more important: October 10. That day, a massive liquidation of leveraged positions took place, which, according to his calculations, was around five times larger than the liquidation during the FTX collapse. Many traders were pushed out of the market in a very short period.
That also changes the way he thinks about a possible Bitcoin decline.
In previous major crypto winters, Bitcoin fell around 75% to 80% from its highs. If it repeated something similar from $120,000, it could approach $40,000.
Serrano does not believe that is the most likely scenario.
His argument is that this time there was no comparable euphoria beforehand and that much of the excessive leverage had already disappeared in October. He also saw something different around $100,000: investors who had held Bitcoin for years began selling to new buyers.
For him, there was a significant turnover in holders, not simply a rush of people buying at any price.
Ripio did not anticipate the top either. They did not sell when Bitcoin was at $120,000 because, Serrano admits, they did not see it in time. They began reducing positions near $110,000 and continued afterward.
Today, the company holds around 60% of its position in fiat currencies and 40% in crypto. Toward the end of the year, it plans to start changing that balance again.
The First Tokenized Asset Was Much Less Exotic
For years, discussions about tokenization focused on examples such as real estate, works of art, farmland, or expensive assets that could be divided into small shares.
Large-scale adoption ended up arriving through something far more familiar: the dollar.
Serrano believes stablecoins were, in practice, the first major tokenized real-world asset.
He also sees an important difference from Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency prices can go through extremely sharp cycles, while the amount of digital dollars circulating on blockchain has grown in a much more consistent way.
That has also led him to reconsider an idea that was repeated for years across the industry: that an asset necessarily improves when it is tokenized.
Not always.
“If something is illiquid, it is probably illiquid for a reason,” he says.
That is why Ripio chose to begin with AL30. It already had significant liquidity and volume before being brought onto blockchain; there was no need to invent a market for it. The company is now working on five other Argentine assets.
The next step is less intuitive: they want to tokenize six Latin American currencies, including the Argentine peso, Brazilian real, Colombian peso, and Peruvian sol.
And in a country where much of the interest in crypto emerged precisely from the desire to move away from the peso, the idea needs some explanation.
What a Digital Peso Could Be Used For
Serrano does not dispute that a significant part of Argentina’s crypto adoption was driven by the search for an alternative to the peso.
But when he talks about tokenizing local currencies, he is not thinking first about saving. He is thinking about using them.
Today, someone can deposit one thousand reais into a wallet and, after conversions and fees, end up with 950 units of another asset whose mechanics they may not even understand. With a real-denominated stablecoin, they put in one thousand and receive one thousand digital reais.
For someone who has never used crypto, it is much easier to understand what is happening.
What interests Serrano most, however, is what could happen with credit.
A person who earns pesos and takes on debt in dollars faces an obvious risk: if the exchange rate changes, the debt may grow while their income remains denominated in the same currency.
Many crypto protocols currently operate in a similar way. A user deposits Bitcoin or another asset as collateral and receives a loan in dollars.
Serrano believes it could work differently: use Bitcoin as collateral, but borrow pesos, reais, or soles. The debt would be denominated in the same currency in which the person earns their income.
Many pieces are still missing before that can work more broadly: unsecured loans, scoring systems, and mechanisms for building a reliable financial history on blockchain.
Tokenized local currencies do not solve all of that. For Serrano, they simply address one part of a problem that has so far been poorly served.
“This Is Not Instagram”
Over the years, Ripio has also watched international competitors with far more capital enter Latin America.
Some left. Others remain, though with plans very different from those they originally brought to the region.
Serrano often explains the problem with a phrase: “This is not Instagram.”
A social network can enter a new country and operate almost exactly as it did in the previous one. A financial platform is much less simple.
There are different banks, different regulations, licenses, specific ways of moving money, and habits that change from one market to another. Translating the app is the easy part.
Ripio maintains teams and licenses in the countries where it operates. It could add more markets, Serrano says, but he sees little point in doing so merely to increase the number of countries shown in a corporate presentation.
For a long time, especially among technology companies, geographic expansion seemed like automatic proof of growth.
In finance, that does not necessarily work. Every new country also brings a new list of problems and, if a company only begins understanding them after entering the market, it will probably pay dearly for that learning process.
One Million Dollars
There is one prediction Serrano continues to stand by: Bitcoin could reach one million dollars before the end of the decade.
When he develops the argument, however, Bitcoin takes a while to appear.
His starting point is that many risk assets are expensive and that at some point a major correction may occur. Faced with a sharp slowdown in economic activity, he expects a familiar response: lower interest rates, more liquidity, and governments trying to keep the economy from slowing too much.
Some of that money usually finds its way back into financial assets.
Up to that point, the story is familiar. What Serrano believes could change the next cycle is artificial intelligence.
In previous recoveries, when cheap money returned, many companies restarted projects, invested, and hired workers. Now a company can invest enormous amounts of money and direct much of it toward data centers, software, automation, or robots.
That creates a different possibility: investment could return without employment recovering in the same proportion.
Serrano does not know whether that will happen. He does not try to assign it a probability either.
What he wonders is what governments would do if capital returns to the economy, companies resume investing and, even then, a large share of jobs does not come back.
One possible response would be new stimulus and even more liquidity.
If that scenario were to occur, he says, it would also change his calculation for Bitcoin.
In that context, one million dollars would no longer necessarily look like a ceiling.
