Rio Trade

Rio Trade is a stablecoin foreign exchange and liquidity provisioning platform built for the Latin American market. Founded in 2022 and based in Mexico City, Rio enables businesses, fintechs, and developers to convert between local LATAM currencies and stablecoins on-chain — faster and at lower cost than traditional FX rails. The company graduated from Y Combinator's Summer 2022 batch and operates with a team of roughly ten people serving clients across Mexico, Colombia, Peru, Chile, and Argentina.

What Rio Does

Rio sits at the intersection of stablecoin infrastructure and regional FX. Its core offering is on-chain conversion between local Latin American currencies and USD-backed or EUR-backed stablecoins, executed with competitive spreads and without the settlement delays typical of correspondent banking. The platform is B2B-first: its clients are fintechs, payment companies, and institutional desks that need programmatic access to stablecoin liquidity rather than retail end-users.

Rio reports handling over $4 billion in annual transaction volume and serving 50 or more institutional clients. The platform supports eight or more local currencies and ten or more stablecoin types, though the full list is not publicly enumerated in documentation.

Key Products

Stablecoin FX: The primary service converts local currency balances into stablecoins (and vice versa) on-chain. Rio's model uses algorithmic pricing and its own banking infrastructure to minimize spreads, positioning itself as a lower-friction alternative to manual OTC desks or centralized exchange rails.

Liquidity Provision and Market Making: Rio provides market-making services that give counterparties access to tight spreads between regional currencies and stablecoins. This is aimed at exchanges, neobanks, and payment platforms that need consistent liquidity depth without building their own treasury operations.

OTC Desk: For larger institutional orders, Rio offers an OTC trading service with ultra-tight spreads, 24/7 market access, and a dedicated relationship manager. This caters to clients where API automation is less important than negotiated pricing and high-touch service.

Developer API: Rio's REST API is documented with OpenAPI 3.0 specifications. It exposes endpoints for managing crypto addresses, bank accounts, bank payments and payouts, crypto payments and payouts, order and quote creation, KYC-gated user onboarding, and webhook event delivery. Bulk payment operations allow clients to consolidate multiple payout instructions into a single settlement action. The API also supports forward-dated and limit orders.

Compliance and AML

Rio emphasizes compliance as a core differentiator. The platform incorporates AML controls that it describes as exceeding standard regulatory requirements, and the user onboarding API includes document upload and KYC review flows. This matters in the LATAM context because the regulatory landscape for stablecoin FX varies significantly by country, and institutional clients often require auditable compliance processes before routing volume.

Team and Background

The company was co-founded by Eudelio Garza (CEO), Javier Roberts (CTO), and Ricardo Villarreal Chapa (COO). Garza previously worked as a Product Manager at BlockVigil, a Polygon node-as-a-service provider, where he helped the platform reach one billion API calls per day and onboarded developers building on Matic. His work on developer infrastructure for emerging markets led him to identify the gap in on-and-off ramping for Latin American businesses. Villarreal Chapa studied Computer Engineering at Boston University and brings experience from engineering product management roles at banks and private equity analysis. The extended leadership team covers operations, finance, legal, compliance, QA engineering, and growth.

Industry Positioning

Rio's YC partner was Diana Hu. The company competes in a space where LATAM-focused fintechs such as Bitso, Ripio, and Kushki also offer stablecoin on/off-ramp services, but Rio differentiates on its institutional focus, API-first architecture, and dedicated liquidity and market-making product. Its infrastructure partnerships include Coinbase, Fireblocks, FalconX, and Bitstamp — custody, prime brokerage, and exchange counterparties that provide the settlement rails and liquidity depth Rio's clients depend on.

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Solana's stablecoin ecosystem has grown into one of the deepest on-chain liquidity pools for USDC in the world, making it a natural settlement layer for platforms routing regional currency conversions through dollar-denominated stablecoins. Rio's on-chain FX model — converting local currencies into stablecoins at internet speed — maps directly to Solana's low-cost, high-throughput characteristics. While Rio does not publicly specify its blockchain integrations in available documentation, its focus on programmatic, API-driven stablecoin operations at scale aligns with the infrastructure profile of a platform serving Solana's stablecoin liquidity.

Rio represents the B2B infrastructure layer of stablecoin adoption in Latin America: not a wallet or consumer app, but the exchange, compliance, and liquidity plumbing that enables fintechs and payment platforms across the region to deploy dollar-denominated digital assets into real-world financial flows.