Celo has become the first blockchain to let AI agents settle payments in local Latin American currencies, with its native x402 facilitator now supporting Ripio’s wARS, wBRL and wCOP stablecoins, the Argentine peso, Brazilian real and Colombian peso. The announcement, made by Celo Core Co. on Medium, means an agent holding pesos can pay another party in pesos without converting through a dollar token first, removing foreign exchange risk from both ends of the transaction.
Agentic payments, where autonomous software pays for API calls, data and services on a user’s behalf, have so far run almost entirely on dollar-denominated stablecoins such as USDC and USDT. That works fine inside the United States but creates currency exposure everywhere else. A merchant pricing goods in Brazilian reais who receives USDC carries the exchange rate risk until it converts, and the same problem applies in reverse for an agent spending on behalf of a user who earns in pesos. Celo’s argument is that agents should not expose their owners to that risk at all, and that local-currency settlement is the way to close the gap.
How the rails work
The x402 standard revives HTTP status code 402, a payment request code that has existed in the web protocol for decades but was never used. When an agent requests a paid resource, the server responds with a 402 and payment terms, the agent settles in stablecoin on-chain, and the resource unlocks. Celo launched its own x402 facilitator on July 16 to settle these payments without custodians, and the facilitator submits transactions while sponsoring gas without ever holding user funds. Settlement runs through EIP-3009’s transferWithAuthorization, so the buyer’s agent moves funds directly to the seller and the facilitator only submits the transaction.
The new integration extends that same facilitator to Ripio’s wFIAT assets. Each token is backed 1:1 by domestic reserves held at regulated financial institutions and independently attested by local auditors. Ripio, a crypto company operating under regulatory licenses across Argentina, Brazil and other Latin American markets, launched the full six-token wFIAT suite on Celo on July 31, including wMXN, wCLP and wPEN for the Mexican peso, Chilean peso and Peruvian sol. Those three are in the pipeline for x402 support, alongside more of the 20 currencies Celo hosts across its 33 stablecoins. Textile FX, a cross-chain liquidity network, already supports wARS and wBRL trading, giving the tokens a conversion path from launch.
“As we build the tools to power everyday use cases with AI for our global community, we’re committed to meeting users where they are,” said Lena Hierzi, Celo Core Co. Developer Relations Lead. Developers can check the live asset list, including the signing domain each token needs, at x402.celo.org.
Why Celo cares
| Celo metric | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Total transactions | 1.4 billion+ | dune.com |
| Monthly stablecoin volume | $6.2 billion | artemis.xyz |
| Daily active users | 700,000 | artemis.xyz |
| Average block time | 1 second | celoscan.io |
| Average gas fee | $0.0005 | celoscan.io |
| Stablecoins listed | 33 across 20 currencies | Celo Core Co. |
Celo migrated from an independent layer-1 to an Ethereum layer-2 in March 2025 and has since positioned itself as the payments chain, with mobile wallet MiniPay and a stablecoin-optimized stack. Its pitch to the agentic economy rests on sub-cent fees and one-second finality, the properties high-frequency machine payments need. Agents can also pay gas fees in stablecoins rather than holding a separate CELO balance, which simplifies treasury management for software that only wants to hold the currency it transacts in. In July it also added native support for the Machine Payments Protocol, Stripe and Tempo’s agentic commerce standard, so builders can settle agent payments in whichever standard their counterparties already use.
The local-currency angle is a genuine differentiator. Most chains compete on speed or cost, and dollars dominate because they are the default. A remittance corridor into Brazil, for example, can now settle in wBRL end to end, and an agent purchasing cloud services for a Colombian business can pay in wCOP without the business ever holding dollars. Whether it works in practice depends on liquidity and pricing in each peso market, but the plumbing exists.
Market context
The announcement lands in a market where agentic payments are drawing real money. Coinbase launched an x402-backed payments product for AI agents earlier this year, Cloudflare and Stripe have both shipped machine-payments standards, and ecosystem grants on Celo saw nearly half of applicants building agentic solutions in the latest round. Real usage is still small. AbaPay, a Celo-based bill-payment service for agents covering airtime, electricity and school fees in Nigeria, reported $32,917 settled across Celo and Base with 16,248 transactions and 401 unique wallets as of Sept. 18, per its ecosystem forum post, which is a proof of concept rather than a business at scale. Notably, 83% of its Celo volume ran through x402 specifically.
The stablecoin market itself sits around $291 billion, with USDT and USDC holding 88.4% of it, per StableCoin.com tracking. Tether alone accounts for $183.3 billion and 62.9% market share. Local-currency tokens are a rounding error by comparison, which is the point: if agents become a meaningful payments channel, the issuers that can quote in a merchant’s own currency have an argument for the flow that dollar tokens cannot match. It also fits the broader pattern of banks and payment firms circling the space, from Apple and Google hiring stablecoin specialists to 39 US state banking associations building their own BankChain Alliance network.
What to watch
Celo says wMXN, wCLP and wPEN support is next, with more of its 20 listed currencies to follow. The open question is adoption outside crypto-native projects: whether banks, processors and software vendors building agent products will route through peso rails or stick with dollars and eat the FX cost. Ripio’s licenses in Argentina and Brazil give the wFIAT tokens a compliance footing that many local-currency experiments lack, which matters when the counterparties are businesses rather than traders. Argentina’s history of currency controls and high inflation makes peso settlement a sensitive design problem, and wARS will be tested by exactly the volatility it is meant to let users sidestep.
The other watch item is standards competition. x402 and MPP now coexist on Celo, and the machine-payments layer of the web is being decided across a handful of incompatible proposals from Cloudflare, Stripe, Coinbase and Google. Whichever standard wins, chains with both native support and local-currency supply are hedged.