--- title: "Stable Takes Episode 6: Stablecoin credit, the midterms and tokenized stocks" description: "Dan Romero and Simon Taylor on El Dorado's stablecoin credit launch in Bolivia with CEO Guillermo Goncalvez, what the US midterms mean for GENIUS, and the DTCC's move into tokenized stocks." path: "/blog/stable-takes-episode-6/" date: "2026-11-06" label: "Stable Takes" image: "/cards/blog-stable-takes-episode-6.webp" --- **_[Stable Takes](https://x.com/stable_takes) is a weekly mini-podcast from Tempo on stablecoins, tokenization, and [agentic payments](/learn/agentic-payments/). Watch Episode 6 above or read the transcript below._** Tempo's Chief Business Officer, [Dan Romero](https://x.com/dwr), and Head of Market Development, [Simon Taylor](https://x.com/sytaylor), open with [Guillermo Goncalvez](https://x.com/stablecoing), CEO of [El Dorado](https://eldorado.io), on why El Dorado brought [stablecoin credit](/blog/tala-el-dorado-embedded-credit/) to Bolivia with [Tala](https://tala.co): a revolving stablecoin credit line for people with no credit history, delivered inside the app. Dan then explains why the midterms leave GENIUS in place, and Simon breaks down the [DTCC's tokenization service](https://www.dtcc.com/digital-assets) and what [tokenized stocks](/learn/tokenized-stocks/) still need to reach consumers. They close on [Fintech NerdCon](https://fintechnerdcon.com). This conversation is lightly edited for clarity. --- **Dan Romero:** Guillermo, welcome to the show. **Guillermo Goncalvez:** Hey Dan, how's it going? Nice to be here. **Dan Romero:** Great. For our audience, it would be great if you could give us a quick overview of what El Dorado is and what customers can do with your app today. **Guillermo Goncalvez:** Of course. To get started, I'm originally from Venezuela. I've been working in the crypto space for nearly 14 years now, and I got obsessed with stablecoins. Stablecoins are one of the best financial products in the world. They enable US dollar access for many countries across the world, like Venezuela, Argentina and Bolivia. El Dorado was one of the first stablecoin digital wallets in LatAm. We initially launched a peer-to-peer on- and off-ramp product that became popular all across the LatAm region, and later on we leveraged that liquidity to process cross-border payments. So we specialize in cross-border payments, covering most of the internal corridors in LatAm. El Dorado today has nearly 1 million customers. We operate across 12 LatAm countries, and we recently launched a credit product, among a few other stablecoin-powered financial services. **Dan Romero:** Great. What were your customers asking for that convinced you to add credit, which you recently did? Was there a particular pain point or conversation that stuck with you? **Guillermo Goncalvez:** Absolutely. The idea of launching a credit product came from our experience in Bolivia specifically. In Bolivia, we are positioned as one of the top three financial apps in the country. We even have a local store in Santa Cruz de la Sierra where our customers can go, ask questions and process payments to China and to other places in the world. So the idea of launching a credit product came from chatting with our customers and doing research about the credit opportunity in Bolivia. Bolivia is the most informal market across LatAm. Approximately 85% of the population works in the informal economy, and the credit gap between Bolivia and the other countries in LatAm is about 3x. In Bolivia, credit penetration is about 5% of GDP, and there's at least a 3 to 4x catch-up opportunity with some of the other countries in LatAm. One of the specific things we were hearing from our customers was that in Bolivia, apart from the traditional credit and credit cards that banks offer to a limited number of customers, the other credit alternatives, such as the installments that some electronics stores provide, require you to have a credit history. That's pretty limiting. If you want to access credit for the first time and the requirement is to have a credit history with your bank, then you are not doing anything to actually bring people into this financial instrument and encourage them to do more with their finances. That was one of the key insights that brought us to the idea of launching a stablecoin-powered credit product in Bolivia. **Dan Romero:** I know that you're working with Tala. Walk me through a little bit how you found them to be the right partner for this credit offering. **Guillermo Goncalvez:** I have been chatting about credit with my co-founders for over a year, or two years, and it's always been something interesting for us. At some point we even wanted to develop some sort of DeFi-backed credit product, maybe similar to how a few other companies have launched crypto-powered credit, where you deposit Bitcoin, wrapped Bitcoin or wrapped ETH and then you get to request a loan in USDT or USDC. But we thought that was not bringing enough value to our customers, because you need to have some capital in the first place to get collateralized credit. So we knew that the right approach was to launch some sort of uncollateralized loan product. We looked at different alternatives, and chatting with the Tempo team, we came out with the Tala connection, and they offered to build a credit facility with us. Initially we're building a revolving credit line. It's denominated in USDT, it starts at $35 to $40, and every time you make a payment on your loan, it grows about 30 to 40%. The idea is that in a few months, some of our initial cohort of customers could get up to $300 or $400 worth of credit. **Dan Romero:** I think an important thing to call out is that you're essentially building people's credit history for the first time. These are people who had no ability to tap into credit, and by using El Dorado with this product, they're actually starting to build a credit history. Is that correct? **Guillermo Goncalvez:** That's totally right. **Dan Romero:** Walk me through a little bit how stablecoins actually help enable this. I think sometimes people think about all these financial services and stablecoins, and they tend to think, "Okay, crypto trading." But can stablecoins actually be impactful in people's lives? Maybe share a little bit about how stablecoins are helping enable this. **Guillermo Goncalvez:** Yeah. Similar to how we approach other products at El Dorado, stablecoins are an infrastructure piece. When we do cross-border payments, let's say moving money from Brazil into Bolivia or from Brazil into Argentina, about half of our customers don't even know that there's a stablecoin flow behind the scenes, and they don't care about it. They just care about sending money to their mother or their father whenever they receive their salaries. That's the type of user behavior we often see at El Dorado. The approach for this credit product is relatively similar. When you register and log in to your El Dorado account, you will see a banner where you will have the opportunity to request a credit line. You will need to answer a few simple questions, we will provide you with an answer in about one to two minutes, and you will immediately receive the credit within the El Dorado app in the form of USDT. The cool thing about stablecoins is that we can embed the credit experience directly into El Dorado's app. We are also building a credit facility where we're leveraging other lenders that are interested in having exposure to these emerging markets and these types of opportunities. We are starting with a $1 million credit facility, but as we scale this, we would like to find more LPs, either crypto or not crypto, that would be interested in financing some of the activity we will see on El Dorado. **Dan Romero:** Great. One last question for me: do you feel like there's an opportunity to offer this product in other countries in Latin America after this initial pilot in Bolivia goes well? **Guillermo Goncalvez:** Absolutely. The ease of accessing your first credit by simply answering a few questions and tapping into the El Dorado app, and also, importantly, being able to pay your credit either with stablecoins or with the 70-plus local payment methods we support at El Dorado, is something that we find pretty special. We are looking at other countries across the region where credit penetration is also pretty low and where customers are open to experimenting with stablecoins and credit products. As soon as we see some of the initial metrics and the initial demand, we will probably scale this to a couple of other underserved economies across LatAm. **Dan Romero:** Well, Guillermo, thanks for coming on. We're excited to continue to partner with you and El Dorado to scale. **Guillermo Goncalvez:** Thanks, Dan. I appreciate it. Take care. Cheers. **Simon Taylor:** I'm well, sir. Great interview, I enjoyed it. Thank you for doing that. I will watch it again. I always like hearing from El Dorado. They were good when they were on Tokenized. But there was some big news this week. There was a midterms thing, and I'm the resident British guy, so I'd love an American perspective. What does this mean for stablecoins and chains and all of us trying to do digital 24/7 money? **Dan Romero:** Yeah. I think it's a big sea-change political event. But as it relates to stablecoins, I think it's worth breaking down, and I sound like a broken record because I'm always talking about GENIUS. GENIUS is law. It passed last year, and it was bipartisan. That's not changing. Think about a Congress that is Democrat-controlled, with a White House that is Republican-controlled, and they don't have the ability to get a supermajority. You've got to get two-thirds, which would be 67 seats, and that's not going to happen. Basically, the only thing that's going to pass is something that's bipartisan. So realistically, GENIUS is going to be the law on the books. It probably means CLARITY isn't happening, but I wouldn't be surprised if some of the elements from CLARITY that the Democrats were maybe a bit more excited about find their way into some type of bipartisan bill at some point in the next two years. We'll see. But I think what's important is that because GENIUS is actual law, its regulatory effects are implemented by the executive branch, so the OCC, and that goes into place next year in a couple of phases. So realistically, it's business as usual if you're in the world of selling stablecoins or anything payments. Whereas I would imagine some of the other stuff in crypto, maybe the SEC and CFTC stuff, which again is still executive branch, has the potential to be changed by another administration in 2028. That will feel a little less sure. But outside of the law being repealed in a future administration, which is a very high bar, I think realistically GENIUS is here to stay. **Simon Taylor:** Yeah. And on GENIUS, my understanding is it comes into force from January, and then from August onwards, the enforcement begins. So this is something where you'll start to see licensing come in and then enforcement. This is getting as on the books as a law can possibly be as it works its way through the agencies. And don't forget the SEC and the CFTC have passed a whole bunch of rulemaking precedents, like allowing perps in the US. And the SEC even issued a couple of no-action letters. There are folks like OKX and ICE starting to do their tokenized stocks. And of course, the other big story is that the DTCC went live with DTS, its tokenization service. **Dan Romero:** Yeah, can you break that down for me? Because I see stuff like this and I'm always a little like, "Okay, what does this actually mean?" It's alphabet soup: low-level infrastructure in TradFi is now doing something. Is this actually impactful? Walk me through it. **Simon Taylor:** It has the potential to be the most impactful thing to happen in financial markets in 50 years. It's not yet. The reason I say that is the DTCC, specifically its subsidiary the DTC, holds every securities record for every United States bond, treasury and stock, period. So all of these securities it already holds could potentially be tokens, which means they can be traded 24/7 on a public chain. Now, they're starting with the Russell 1000 stocks, and they're starting on Canton and the DTCC's own private Besu network. So there's a limit to how much access people have on day one, because those chains are used in capital markets a little bit, but they're not used by retail, and they're not as widely known as some other public chains. There's going to be some time before you feel this. But in principle, any holder of any legal security in a brokerage account could swap between the record that sits in the brokerage account and the tokenized form. You could hold a tokenized form of your stock in a wallet and send it to anybody else's wallet instantly, 24/7. It suddenly becomes as composable as any other asset. What else is interesting about this is that the SEC cleared it in December 2025, with a no-action letter for those Russell 1000 stocks, major ETFs and treasuries. And you've got JPMorgan, Citi, Bank of America, Fidelity and Citadel signed up. All of the horses and all of the cavalry have arrived. It's big enough to be meaningful, but what I think it's missing is the type of chain that has a consumer adoption moment, or the type of brokerage that has a consumer adoption moment. I would imagine when a Robinhood or somebody like that adopts this, it could really kick off. But it's one of those quiet explosions on a mountainside somewhere: that's interesting, but it's not going to hit me for a few months. Last thing: Fintech NerdCon is in two weeks, and tickets are nearly sold out. It's the 19th and 20th of November in San Diego. We're going to have the COO of Nubank, the co-founder of Chime and more. This is where the neobanks building the cutting-edge stuff in stablecoins are coming to talk about what they're building. But also, quietly, I have assembled all of the nerds building agentic commerce at most of the big payments companies. So if you're interested in either of those topics, head to [fintechnerdcon.com](https://fintechnerdcon.com) and grab yourself a ticket. And if you know some friends at Tempo, they might even be able to swing you a ticket or a discount. So reach out to anyone at Tempo if you want to join us. **Dan Romero:** Awesome. Good to see you. **Simon Taylor:** Good to see you, man. Catch you next time. All right, cheers.