Colombian Neobank Connects OpenTrade With Avalanche for Interest-bearing USD Accounts

Littio, a Colombian neobank, is bridging DeFi with traditional finance to bring dollar-denominated instruments to its clients. The South American entity has launched a new product with OpenTrade, a firm that offers stablecoin yield products backed by real-world assets.

Littio clients can now access ‘Yield Pots’ through the Avalanche network and receive returns backed by U.S. T-bills. According to a press release shared with The Defiant, these accounts have processed $80 million since launching four months ago on Ethereum, and have paid out $250,000 in yield.

“We see this as a case study in how these types of products (stablecoins and RWAs combined) can be packaged in high quality, extremely easy-to-use financial applications like the Littio app,” said Jeff Handler, Chief Commercial Officer at OpenTrade.

He told The Defiant that in doing so, they “gain serious traction with 'mainstream' non-crypto users who are able to unlock value through expanded access to USD-denominated financial products.”

The move aims to broaden financial inclusion in a region desperately in need of access to dollars. As per the Visual Capitalist, roughly 20% of the population remains unbanked in Latin America, but in Colombia, the figure rises to a whopping 40%, as per 2021 data. That number is considerably lower than its 54% mark from 2019 – showing a trend that will hopefully accelerate.

According to October 2023 research from Chainanalysis, Colombian users execute roughly $200 million worth of cryptocurrency transactions annually. The activity ranks Colombia 32nd by digital asset adoption worldwide, and fourth among Latin American nations behind Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.

Another notable move is Littio and OpenTrade’s migration from Ethereum to Avalanche. Handler explained that Avalanche’s EVM compatibility – which shows that companies aren’t fading the ecosystem entirely – sub-second transaction finality, low transaction fees, and consistency “have proven compelling for institutional deployments and tokenized assets.”

This isn’t the first time a Colombian entity taps into a cryptocurrency project. In June, Bancolombia Group, the country’s largest bank, integrated with Chainlink to offer proof of reserves for its COPW stablecoin. The organization entered the Web3 sector after ten years of research.