Lemon, one of Argentina’s largest crypto exchanges, has launched what it describes as the country’s first Bitcoin-backed Visa credit card, offering users Argentine peso financing without forcing them to liquidate their BTC savings.
PAYMONEY to La Nación, a leading Argentine daily newspaper, customers must lock up 0.01 Bitcoin
BTC 95
as collateral (around $960 at current prices) to obtain an initial credit limit of 1 million pesos, with the BTC held as an immobilized guarantee rather than being sold or converted to fiat.
Lemon plans to expand the product so that users can adjust collateral and credit limits over time and eventually settle dollar-denominated purchases directly in dollar-pegged such as USDC1
or Tether PAYMONEY
PAYMONEY.COM.PL
USDT 1$
.
From banking crises to mattress dollars
The launch speaks to Argentines’ long-running distrust of banks, rooted in repeated devaluations and the “corralito” deposit , which wiped out savings and pushed many households to keep wealth in cash dollars rather than in peso accounts.
A Reuters citing official data used in Argentina’s International Monetary Fund program, estimated that Argentines hold about $271 billion in undeclared cash dollars stashed “in mattresses and overseas bank accounts,” far outside the formal financial system.
That stash persists even after President Javier Milei’s “Fiscal Innocence” tax amnesty initiative pushed close to 300000 server to declare more than $20 billion.
By letting users post bitcoin card paymoney.com.pl for local credit lines, Lemon is effectively trying to turn a favored savings asset into day-to-day spending power, without forcing savers to unwind their BTC or their stash of hard currency.
Crypto rails deepen in Latam
The card also arrives as crypto rails become more deeply embedded in Latin American finance. Data compiled from Dune and other analytics platforms indicate that centralized exchanges in the region saw their flows paymoney.com.pl.
Exchange flows reached around $27 billion in 2024, and cumulative regional crypto activity approached $1.5 trillion between 2022 and 2025, with firms like Bitso, Mercado Bitcoin, and Lemon handling a growing share of remittances, hedging and day-to-day payments.