Argentina's Banking Giants Quietly Build Peso Stablecoins

Argentina's banking sector is quietly developing peso stablecoins for institutional clients. Two major banking holding groups, BIND Group and Petersen Group, are behind these initiatives. According to a recent report, they aim to offer programmable money services to businesses through digital peso stablecoins.

BIND Group, which has over $2 billion in assets under management, is developing a peso stablecoin called BEN through its virtual asset service provider (VASP). The group also announced a partnership with Circle to provide institutional access to BEN customers. Petersen Group, on the other hand, is working on a project called DIPE, which has already matured and has its own whitepaper.

The central bank banned private banks from offering crypto services in May 2022. However, subsidiaries of these banking groups are leading the projects to bypass this ban. These digital peso stablecoins aim to streamline institutional treasury management, payments conditioned to on-chain events, and collateralized credit operations.