Bringing stablecoin payments to the streets of Buenos Aires
How Privy and BluCash brought rolled out in-person onchain payments to hundreds of people at Devconnect
Debbie Soon
|Nov 25, 2025
Last week at Devconnect, Privy brought stablecoin payments out of the conference halls and onto the streets of Buenos Aires. While onchain commerce was a theme across panels this year, we felt it was just as important, if not more, to show what it looks like in practice.
In partnership with BluCash, a local Argentine company building on Privy, we rolled out a live, production-ready stablecoin experience for hundreds of people. No prototypes. No staged demos. Just real users, real merchants, and real money moving onchain.
Why Argentina, why now
As outlined in our LatAm stablecoin report last week, Argentina is one of the world’s most active stablecoin markets. Every vendor we worked with accepted stablecoins for payments. Here, stablecoins isn’t an experiment. Instead, they are infrastructure adopted out of necessity, not hype.
Years of hyperinflation have pushed people to look for more reliable ways to store value. Stablecoins, pegged to the US dollar, offer a level of stability and optionality that the local currency can’t.
But despite widespread use of stablecoins for savings, merchants still overwhelmingly price and settle payments in Argentine pesos (ARS). That dichotomy of saving in one currency and spending in another is exactly where BluCash steps in.
BluCash’s parent company issues ARST, a stablecoin pegged to and redeemable 1:1 for the Argentine peso. BluCash is their first B2C app, giving users a single place to hold ARST for everyday spending while also instantly swapping between ARST and USDC for savings. All of this runs inside a Privy-powered, self-custodial wallet.
The result: one single app for spending and protecting value, powered by secure, scalable wallet infrastructure.
Instant, intuitive, and invisible UX powered by Privy
Privy and BluCash had a simple goal: demonstrate that onchain payments can feel easier than the fintech apps people already use. With Privy powering onboarding and embedded wallets under the hood:
New users were live in seconds: no seed phrases, no setup friction, no dropoff
Self-custodial wallets were automatically created and secured behind the scenes
Instant swaps between ARST and USDC gave users full control over how they spend or save
Merchants received ARST instantly via QR code, with no need to understand the underlying infrastructure
QR code payments are already ubiquitous in Argentina thanks to leading the leading fintech of the region Mercado Pago. From large e-commerce sites to street vendors, it’s become the default way to pay. BluCash mirrored this familiar flow, making it fast, local, and intuitive, all while keeping the entire experience onchain and protected by Privy.
Introducing the stablecoin sandwich truck
To bring this to life, Privy brought to Buenos Aires our first ever Stablecoin Sandwich (or Sándwich de Stablecoin) truck just outside Devconnect.
A stablecoin sandwich is a term used to describe real flows businesses use every day: fiat → stablecoin → fiat, routed through a stablecoin in the middle to make payments faster, cheaper, and more reliable than traditional rails.
We localized the entire experience to Buenos Aires:
choripán on the menu
a lomo saltado-inspired special
pre-funded wallets for attendees
live ARST payments at the window
Hundreds of people lined up, and every order was paid for using the BluCash app. Instant onchain settlement for the merchant, and a seamless experience that felt no different from existing payment methods for the user.
Why this matters
Stablecoins are not abstract infrastructure anymore. They are daily tools for people navigating real economic uncertainty. Argentina’s developers, consumers, and merchants understand this better than almost anywhere else in the world.
By giving them one app where spending, saving, and swapping coexist seamlessly, BluCash is making stablecoins usable. And by giving BluCash secure, scalable wallet infrastructure, Privy helps make that usability accessible to millions.
Lastly, by bringing this activation to the streets, we showed what happens when the right UX meets the right moment: onchain money becomes something people simply use.
What’s next
This activation is just the beginning. Privy is committed to shaping how stablecoin payments evolve for both consumers and businesses, whether they’re saving, spending, or building entirely new financial flows on top of programmable money.
The Stablecoin Sandwich truck may be retired from the streets of Buenos Aires, but it’s inspired us to think and dream bigger. We’re already exploring future activations that bring real onchain experiences directly to users, wherever they are.
A big thank you to BluCash, as well as to all our partners — Eigencloud, Uniswap, Zerion, 0x, Matcha, Polygon, and Boys Club — who opened their venues, collaborated with us throughout Devconnect, and helped bring this vision to life. We’re excited to keep building together, and to keep showing what stablecoin payments can look like in the real world.
