In brief
- Opera and the Celo Foundation are extending their partnership to widen access to low-cost stablecoin payments, announcing the plans during Binance Blockchain Week.
- MiniPay is adding new features, including stablecoin-backed payment cards, and a joint Mini App Roadshow across Asia and South America in 2026.
- The wallet recently integrated Mercado Pago and Brazil’s PIX system for stablecoin-to-real-time payments, a pilot Opera says will expand globally soon.
Opera and the Celo Foundation announced at Binance Blockchain Week that they are extending their partnership to bring financial inclusion to a billion people by 2030 by making low-cost stablecoin payments “ubiquitous around the world.”
The announcement includes plans for stablecoin-backed payment cards, expanded real-world asset offerings, and a joint Mini App Roadshow across Asia and South America, according to a Wednesday statement by Opera.
Their goal is to give people “a reliable stablecoin wallet that allows them to receive payments, save, and send payments—no matter where they are,” Jørgen Arnesen, EVP Mobile at Opera, said in the statement.
MiniPay, a non-custodial stablecoin wallet provider built on Celo, claims to have grown to 11 million activated wallets and processed over 300 million transactions since launching in September 2023, helping push Celo to the top of Ethereum layer-2s by daily active users, with 700,000 daily active users (DAUs) and over 3 million weekly USDT users.
It recently added support for Mercado Pago, the digital payments platform of Latin American e-commerce firm Mercado Libre, and PIX, Brazil’s central bank–run instant payments system, enabling stablecoin-to-real-time payments in Argentina and Brazil.
“This early pilot will expand to all users globally to further reduce off-ramping friction,” the statement said.
Global stablecoin growth
The joint MiniApp roadshow will run across Asia and South America in early 2026, targeting regions with strong developer activity and expanding crypto adoption.
Latin America has recorded nearly $1.5 trillion in crypto transaction volume between July 2022 and this June, according to a Chainalysis report, with Brazil leading the region with $318.8 billion in crypto value received, representing 109.9% period-over-period growth.
Over 90% of Brazilian crypto flows are now stablecoin-related, with stablecoin purchases making up more than half of all exchange activity in Brazil, Argentina, and Colombia.
The stablecoin market is currently valued at over $310 billion, per CoinGecko data, but users on prediction market Myriad overwhelmingly expect that their total capitalization will not exceed $360 billion before next February.
(Disclaimer: Myriad is owned by Decrypt‘s parent company, Dastan.)
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