Paradigm has led a roughly $9 million funding round in El Dorado, a stablecoin-powered payments application built for Latin America. The deal pushes one of crypto’s largest venture firms deeper into dollar-rails for emerging markets.

The round was reported by The Block, which said Paradigm led the financing of about $9 million. El Dorado runs a peer-to-peer marketplace and payments app that lets users in the region buy, hold and send digital dollars, mostly the Tether stablecoin USDT. The company says its SuperApp has crossed one million users and connects stablecoins to dozens of local payment channels.

El Dorado targets a region where access to US dollars is constrained by capital controls, inflation and thin banking coverage. Its app links USDT and other dollar tokens to local rails across Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Panama and Peru, letting users move value between bank apps, cash networks and digital wallets. The company wound down its Venezuela operations earlier, though Venezuela had been one of its strongest markets.

What El Dorado Built

The product started as a peer-to-peer exchange and has expanded into a broader payments stack. Its El Dorado Pay feature handles instant transfers between users, and the app routes settlement through USDT on Arbitrum to cut transaction costs. Tether and Mountain Protocol’s USDM are the dollar tokens it leans on most.

El Dorado raised a $3 million seed round in 2024 led by Multicoin Capital, with Coinbase Ventures, UC Berkeley SkyDeck and Awesome People Ventures participating.

Paradigm’s Emerging-Markets Tilt

The El Dorado check fits a pattern at Paradigm. In December the firm made its first Brazil investment, putting $13.5 million into Crown, a startup issuing a Brazilian-real stablecoin for institutions.

The firm has also been writing checks across crypto payments and DeFi more broadly. This month it co-led a $175 million round in lending protocol Morpho alongside a16z Crypto and Ribbit Capital, one of the largest fundraises in DeFi history.

A Crowded LatAm Dollar Race

Latin America has become a testing ground for stablecoin payments as established remittance and card networks move in. Western Union made its USDPT stablecoin available on Bybit’s fiat channels in Latin America this month, and MoneyGram has signed on as an anchor remittance validator on the Tempo blockchain. El Dorado’s pitch is that a crypto-native app, rather than a retrofitted incumbent, can win the region’s everyday dollar flows.

Paradigm and El Dorado have not published their own statements on the financing. The round’s full investor list, valuation and the use of proceeds were not detailed in The Block’s report.