What Happens When Every Currency Goes Onchain?

Over the last decade, the world has digitized everything except money. Messaging, identity, entertainment, and commerce all moved to the internet. But national currencies remained trapped in bank accounts, subject to time zones, fees, and paperwork.

That’s changing fast. As of mid 2025, over 30 fiat pegged stablecoins exist across public blockchains, representing currencies from the Dollar and Euro to the Kenyan Shilling, Colombian Peso, and Brazilian Real. These tokens now settle trillions in value every month, and for the first time, we’re starting to see what a world looks like when currencies live natively onchain.

Mento is building critical infrastructure to make this work.

The Shift to Onchain Currencies Is Already Underway

This isn’t a hypothetical future. The data is clear:

• Stablecoins processed $14 trillion in Q1 2025 alone, outpacing Visa
  
  
• The total stablecoin market cap surpassed $250 billion by June 2025
  
  
• Non-USD stablecoins like EURC, BRZ, and XSGD saw year-over-year volume growth of over 45%
  
  
• Local stablecoins now power over 30% of onchain FX swap volume across emerging markets
  
  
• Over 70 countries have users holding or transacting in fiat-backed stablecoins
  
  

Today, local currency stablecoins like the cCOP (Colombian Peso), cKES (Kenyan Shilling), and cREAL (Brazilian Real) aren’t just proofs of concept, they’re in daily use for loans, payments, and peer-to-peer trade.

Mento powers these use cases across 15+ currencies, backed by transparent reserves and open and decentralized governance. Mento provides the infrastructure that stablecoin users can swap different currencies at the exchange rate instantly. 

Onchain Currencies Redraw the Map of Money

When currencies go onchain, everything about how money moves changes:

1. Currencies move at internet speed
Bank wires take days. Onchain swaps take seconds. A business in Nairobi can now pay a partner in Bogotá with a cKES → cCOP swap on Mento, settled instantly, at FX rates tracked by an oracle and all based on open source smart contracts.

2. The cost of remittance and conversion drops by 80–90%
Traditional FX for small transactions often costs 3–7%. Onchain swaps via Mento’s FX infrastructure cost 0.05–0.3%, including AMM spreads and gas fees. Sending $200 to another country can now cost less than $0.30.

3. Markets don’t sleep anymore
Bank-based FX closes on weekends and holidays. Onchain FX runs all year round 7 days a week, and liquidity remains accessible across apps, time zones, and blockchains.

4. Anyone can build with money as a primitive
Devs no longer need to integrate third-party bank APIs or negotiate FX contracts. Mento’s currency layer gives them stable, real-world pegged assets with programmable minting, conversion, and reserve logic.

Mento’s Architecture Was Built for This World

Most stablecoin protocols focus on just one or two currencies, often limited to the U.S. dollar or Euro. Mento is designed from the beginning to support a truly multi-currency environment where global and local currencies move across blockchains, borders, and applications with ease.

Today, the Mento platform supports 15 different fiat-pegged stablecoins, ranging from cUSD to cKES (Kenyan Shilling), cCOP (Colombian Peso), cREAL (Brazilian Real), and others. Each currency is backed by diversified onchain collateral and governed transparently by the Mento community. Also commonly used stablecoins, like USDt and USDC are integrated in Mento’s infrastructure. 

At the core of Mento’s FX engine is a system of Fixed Price Market Makers, or FPMMs. These smart contracts price swaps between stablecoins using real-world foreign exchange rates, avoiding the volatility and inefficiencies of traditional AMMs. Whether converting cUSD to cKES or cCOP to cEUR, users trade at rates aligned with global currency markets without intermediaries or excessive slippage.

To support local issuance, Mento also implements Collateralized Debt Positions (CDPs). These allow local stablecoins to be minted against Dollar stablecoins while maintaining peg stability and collateral health. This approach gives local stablecoins economic integrity without depending on centralized issuers or offchain assets.

The platform’s architecture is being designed to be multichain. Developers and applications will soon tap into Mento's FX and stablecoin system regardless of where they build, removing the need to rely on bridges or fragmented liquidity.

Mento is not a theoretical infrastructure. In 2024 alone, it served over 7 million users and processed 550 million transactions. It's live in apps like Squid Router, MiniPay, and Valora, powering swaps, payments, and remittances every day. The system already handles hundreds of thousands of swaps daily and it’s designed to scale far beyond that, with the throughput to serve millions more.

A Future Without Currency Gatekeepers

In today’s banking system, currency exchange depends on intermediaries: correspondent banks, FX dealers, wire processors, and closed ledgers. Each adds friction, each charges a fee, each slows things down.

Onchain currencies remove the need for trust in those gatekeepers.

With Mento:

• You can swap from digital pesos to dollars without touching a bank
  
  
• You can hold local money without exposure to banking crises or currency collapses
  
  
• You can move between continents without having to bridge across five systems
  
  
• You can price your business in your currency but settle with customers in theirs
  
  

And this applies not just to users but to institutions, apps, and governments.

The Real World Signals Are Here

A few signs of where things are heading:

• In Kenya, Mento powered cKES is being used for local credit issuance through mobile apps
  
  
• In Colombia, workers are paid in cUSD, then swap to cCOP at better-than-bank FX rates
  
  
• In Sub-Saharan Africa, onchain stablecoin transfers now account for 43% of crypto volume
  
  
• Visa’s crypto research arm reported over $5 trillion in stablecoin settlements in 2024
  
  

These are onchain transactions happening now. Each one chips away at the legacy model of cross border finance.

So What Happens When Every Currency Goes Onchain?

The world becomes interoperable.

Stablecoins become not just assets, but interfaces for money. Local currencies gain global mobility. Dollarization no longer requires physical cash. Remittances become just transfers. Lending, saving, and earning happen without conversion tax.

Every app becomes a financial app. Every economy gets a programmable monetary layer.

And Mento becomes the standard for that infrastructure.

Mento is not trying to replace currencies. It is putting them where they belong: on the internet.

If you’re building in payments, lending, FX, or local economic access, Mento is already the system to build on.

To learn more about how Mento making onchain FX work for real people in real markets, explore the Mento ecosystem today!

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