Amid Inflation Worries, Colombian Fintech Taps Euro Yields to Protect Latin Americans’ Savings
London, United Kingdom, February 25th, 2025, Chainwire
Littio, a Colombian fintech focused on protecting Latin Americans from devaluation through various dollar-based product offerings, is launching a new EURO account and savings option, using Circle’s EURC and OpenTrade‘s real-world asset (RWA)-backed stablecoin yield platform via the Avalanche network. This new offering allows Littio users in Latin America and Europe to instantly create a EURO IBAN account and earn stable yield on their holdings, with no minimums, which is unmatched by any other EUR-based bank account options on the market today. Latin American people and companies will now be able to seamlessly open a European account, accept local payments, send money home, and earn a superior yield on their savings.
Littio’s mobile banking app has already helped tens of thousands of users overcome a prevalent barrier within the LatAm banking sector–the lack of access to dollar-based savings accounts. Through their USDC yield product powered by OpenTrade, Littio has been able to provide users with a true end-to-end USD banking and savings outlet offers have a simple, fast, low-cost means of converting pesos into dollars (via USDC), which they can save, transfer, and spend in-app or with a Littio international card. This combination of simplicity and returns that far exceeds those offered by any traditional banks in the region, has allowed Littio to drive significant adoption over the course of 2024 with over $100M USDC yield subscription volume through OpenTrade’s USDC yield vault, which has become one of the fastest growing RWA protocol on the Avalanche network (January, 2025).
Off the back of the success of Littio’s USDC yield product, and to fill the current gap in EUR-denominated account offerings, Littio is bringing the same experience and benefits to this new IBAN account and savings product. By unlocking access to EURO accounts and savings for users across Latin America and Europe, three distinctly new use cases for three distinctly new customer personas are unlocked:
- Freelancers living in Latin America can now seamlessly accept payments from European clients in their personal European bank account.
- Latin American migrants living and working in Europe can now send hard-earned money to their families.
- Latin American companies operating in Europe have a new cost-effective option to repatriate European profits.
- Latin Americans studying in Europe can now save and spend in euros (i.e., masters degrees, college)
Our 6% yield is unmatched for both EURC and EUR bank accounts. It will incentivize adoption, unlock savings options for people who didn’t have them before, and perhaps unlock new use cases for customer personas we are not yet seeing.
This is a perfect example of how stablecoin infrastructure is coming together to deliver products for the underbanked. These are not people without bank accounts. Instead, they are people with needs for financial services that are not addressed by traditional banks.
“Littio’s new EURO IBAN account and savings offering exemplifies how Avalanche’s technology can power innovative financial solutions that are otherwise inaccessible via traditional banking rails,” said Morgan Krupetsky, Head of Institutions & Capital Markets at Ava Labs. “By leveraging Avalanche’s high-performance, low fee network, Littio and OpenTrade can offer cross-border banking solutions to users who have historically been underserved. We’re excited to continue seeing this next wave of real-world financial products and services being built on Avalanche.”
“This product is truly transformational for Latin American people and companies operating in Europe,” said Felipe Galvis, SVP of Business Development at OpenTrade. “We can now seamlessly open a European bank account, accept and send payments to all European Economic Area countries, send money home at the speed of the internet, and earn the best Euro yield anywhere in the world. The product is a testament to ecosystem collaboration yielding compelling financial solutions tailored to the needs of the underbanked.”
About OpenTrade
OpenTrade is an institutional grade platform for real world asset backed lending and stablecoin yield products. Backed by investors including a16z Crypto and Circle, the OpenTrade platform has been built to allow any company to power their own stablecoin yield products for their users, who can trust in OpenTrade’s enterprise-grade technology systems, and the security guarantees of our time-tested legal protections and bank-grade asset management operations.
About the Avalanche Blockchain Network
Avalanche is an ultra-fast, low-latency blockchain platform designed for builders who need high performance at scale. The network’s architecture allows for the creation of sovereign, efficient and fully interoperable public and private layer 1 (L1) blockchains which leverage the Avalanche Consensus Mechanism to achieve high throughput and near-instant transaction finality. The ease and speed of launching an L1, and the breadth of architectural customization choices, make Avalanche the perfect environment for a composable multi-chain future.
Supported by a global community of developers and validators, Avalanche offers a fast, low-cost environment for building decentralized applications (dApps). With its combination of speed, flexibility, and scalability, Avalanche is the platform of choice for innovators pushing the boundaries of blockchain technology.
About Ava Labs
Ava Labs is a leading blockchain technology company dedicated to empowering organizations to build scalable decentralized applications (dApps) and custom blockchains. Headquartered in New York City, Ava Labs is driven by a dynamic team that creates cutting-edge tools for developers, enabling them to harness the power of the community-driven Avalanche Blockchain Network. Ava Labs supports the launch of Avalanche Layer 1 blockchains, helping clients—from startups to government agencies, financial institutions, gaming companies, and telecoms—transform industries and pioneer new ones.
