Colombia-based stablecoin protocol El Dorado said Tuesday it completed a $3 million seed venture capital investment round to build a crypto payments "superapp" for the Latin American region.

Multicoin Capital was the lead investor, with crypto exchange Coinbase's venture capital arm Coinbase Ventures, UC Berkeley Skydeck and Awesome People Ventures also participating in the round.

Stablecoins are a $160 billion asset class within crypto, with their prices anchored to an external asset, predominantly to the U.S. dollar. They are increasingly popular in developing regions such as Latin America with less developed banking systems and history of currency devaluations.

Dollar-pegged stablecoins are also a cheaper option than traditional banking and remittance rails to send money abroad.

"The Latin American economy is reeling due to decades of inflation," Guillermo Goncalvez, co-founder and CEO of El Dorado, said in a statement. "Making matters worse, local cross-border exchanges charge excessive fees – an astonishing 6% for a normal, run-of-the-mill currency swap. The combination of these two forces makes it almost impossible for the people of Latin America to retain or grow their wealth,” he added.

El Dorado, which is available in Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Panama, Peru and Venezuela, provides a cheaper way to send, exchange and pay using blockchain as payment rail. The platform charges 0.6% fee for cross-border payments, significantly less than the industry average, while in-app payments are free.

The app is connected to more than 70 local payment methods to facilitate on-ramp and off-ramp to fiat currencies. It supports Tether's USDT, Circle's USDC and Celo Dollar (cUSD) stablecoins on the Tron, Polygon and Celo networks, while also allows bitcoin (BTC) transactions.

The app processed about one million transactions over the past year, the company said.

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Krisztian Sandor

Krisztian Sandor recently graduated from NYU's business and economic reporter program as a Fulbright fellow and worked with Reuters and Forbes previously. Originally from Budapest, Hungary, he is now based in New York. He holds BTC and ETH.