Paradigm leads $9M investment in LatAm payments app El Dorado

Paradigm, one of crypto’s most influential venture firms, is leading a $9 million funding round into El Dorado, a Latin American payments app built around stablecoins and peer-to-peer exchange.

The round triples the size of El Dorado’s previous raise. The company closed a $3 million seed round in mid-2024 led by Multicoin Capital, with Coinbase Ventures and Berkeley Skydeck also participating.

What El Dorado actually does

The platform lets users trade digital dollars and stablecoins peer-to-peer, convert fiat to digital assets instantly, and send money across borders without the usual friction. The app integrates with over 70 local payment systems across Latin America, including widely used platforms like Pix, PayPal, and Zelle.

El Dorado leans heavily on USDT running on Arbitrum, Ethereum’s leading layer-2 scaling network. El Dorado has surpassed 1 million users and processed more than 4 million P2P transactions since launch. In Venezuela specifically, it ranks as the fourth most-downloaded finance app.

Why Latin America, why now

Countries like Venezuela and Argentina have endured years of severe inflation that erodes the purchasing power of local currencies in real time. When your national currency can lose significant value in a matter of weeks, a dollar-pegged stablecoin isn’t a speculative investment. It’s a savings account that actually saves.

El Dorado’s CEO, Guillermo Goncalvez, brings regional crypto experience to the table. Before founding the payments app, he built and exited Lioncave Mining, an early Bitcoin mining operation based in Venezuela.

What this means for investors

Paradigm has historically concentrated its bets on deep protocol-level infrastructure, DeFi primitives, and cutting-edge cryptography research. Backing a consumer payments app in Latin America represents a broadening of that thesis.

If El Dorado’s 1 million-plus users are transacting primarily in USDT on Arbitrum, that’s a meaningful channel lock for both Tether and the Arbitrum ecosystem.

One risk worth watching: regulatory environments across Latin America remain inconsistent and evolving. El Dorado’s integration with 70-plus local payment systems suggests it’s already navigating this complexity, but scaling across multiple jurisdictions with different regulatory frameworks is the kind of challenge that has tripped up better-funded companies before.

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