Bridge bets on tokenized local currencies beyond the dollar

Zach Abrams, the co-founder of stablecoin firm Bridge, tells Fortune he was surprised when the bulk of his business came from non-U.S. markets in Latin America, Europe, and Africa. His first customers were not asking for a slicker dollar rail but for cross-border payment infrastructure between the U.S. and Colombia, payouts into Venezuela and the Philippines, corridors where the existing system punishes movement. There was, Abrams says, all that pent-up demand outside the U.S. to build with stablecoins.

Bridge was built for that demand: Abrams co-founded the company in San Francisco in 2021 with Sean Yu, now chief technology officer, on a bet that stablecoins offered a cheaper, faster way of moving money than existing rails. By 2024 the firm was processing payment volume at an annualized rate of more than $5 billion, had raised $58 million from backers including Sequoia and Haun Ventures, and counted SpaceX as a client using its technology to repatriate Starlink earnings back to the U.S. Stripe bought Bridge in 2024 for $1.1 billion, then its largest acquisition.

The context for Abrams's argument is the dollar's near-total grip on the sector. Dollar-denominated tokens make up more than 95% of all stablecoin transactions, and governments outside the U.S. are unnerved, fearing stablecoins will reinforce the dollar's dominance in global trade and financial flows. Abrams reads that concentration as a sign of how early the industry still is: “We're in the early stages,” he says, “but in a world where more and more of our infrastructure is tokenized, it's going to be incredibly important to have tokenized local currencies.”

Bridge is already testing that thesis in specific currencies: it supports tokenized euros, Mexican pesos, and British pounds, and will soon add Brazilian reais. The Singapore dollar is not yet supported, but Abrams uses Singapore to explain the logic — businesses there will want to hold tokenized Singapore dollars so they can convert them into Treasuries or other assets to earn yield. The local currency is the entry point; the yield is the attraction.

That attraction is where the non-dollar thesis runs into the dollar: Abrams's argument is that local-currency stablecoins can take over the dollar's role in transactions, but the yield he promises comes from U.S. Treasuries. A tokenized Singapore dollar convertible into Treasuries is not an escape from the dollar standard; it is a new on-ramp to it. The token can carry local currency risk on the way in and dollar risk on the way out, making the stablecoin a wrapper for the very asset it was meant to challenge. The dollar's hold on the sector may weaken at the transaction layer even as it tightens at the asset layer.

The tension has a history on this desk: when Revolut put Bridge's license in front of 75 million customers, this publication argued that stablecoin winners will own distribution, not issuance. Bridge, now part of Stripe, owns distribution. The open question is what it distributes. If tokenized local currencies route savers into U.S. Treasuries, the policy conversation stops being about stablecoin definitions and becomes a dollar funding conversation. The BIS-IMF evidence on stablecoin flows spilling into currency markets and lifting dollar funding costs starts to govern, and yield rules get negotiated with funding costs in mind.

The timing suggests Bridge is not waiting for the debate to resolve: DAD's records show a $500 million Bridge fund launch dated Aug. 27, a product book being built ahead of the narrative. It fits the firm's pattern — build the plumbing, let the market argue about what flows through it.

The tokenized local-currency story is a substantial adoption angle with the founder's own surprised voice behind it, but the test is whether the yield stays local. Businesses in Singapore may well hold tokenized Singapore dollars; the question is whether those tokens convert into Singapore government securities or into U.S. Treasuries. The answer will decide whether Bridge's next act is a genuinely multi-currency system or a more elegant dollar standard.