Argentina regulates stablecoin activity through its anti-money-laundering statute rather than through a dedicated crypto law, and the practical consequence is that the obligation attaches to the provider of the service rather than to the asset. A company that exchanges, transfers, or holds virtual assets on behalf of others falls inside a defined category and a public registry; a company that merely receives a stablecoin payment for its own goods does not.
This is where the rules stood when this post was checked, on September 24, 2026. Argentina moves faster than its neighbours on this subject, so treat the date as part of the content rather than as a footnote. For the regional comparison, Brazil's framework took a different route to a similar place.
The law defines the actor, not the token
The definition sits in Argentina's anti-money-laundering law, Ley 25.246, whose article 4 bis was added by Ley 27.739, published in the Boletín Oficial on March 15, 2024. It describes a virtual asset service provider as any natural or legal person who, as a business, carries out one or more of a listed set of activities on behalf of another: exchanging virtual assets for fiat currency, exchanging one virtual asset for another, transferring virtual assets, holding or administering them, and providing financial services connected to the offer or sale of a virtual asset.
That list will look familiar to anyone who has read the international standard, and that is the point: it is the same five activities that the FATF recommendation describes, transposed into domestic law. The Argentine category is the PSAV (Proveedor de Servicios de Activos Virtuales, the local term for a virtual asset service provider). The same acronym means something different in Brazil, which is a reliable source of confusion in regional documents. The underlying category is the VASP (virtual asset service provider, the FATF term), and how that category works covers where it comes from and which activities pull a business into it.
Article 37 of Ley 27.739 names the Comisión Nacional de Valores, the securities regulator, as the authority responsible for the subject, and instructs it to centralize information about who qualifies in a registry.
What Resolución General 994/2024 did
The CNV built that registry by amending its own rulebook. Resolución General 994/2024, issued on March 22, 2024 and published on March 25, 2024, renamed Title XIV of the CNV Norms to include the registry of virtual asset service providers, and added a new Chapter III to that title covering those providers.
Two things are worth reading precisely here. The resolution creates a registry and the conditions for entering it; it does not create a licence in the sense that a banking authorization is a licence. And its authority traces back to the anti-money-laundering statute, which tells you what the registry is for: identifying who is performing these activities in Argentina, so that the obligations of that statute can attach to them.
What Resolución General 1058/2025 added
Roughly a year later, the CNV filled in the substance. Resolución General 1058/2025 was issued on March 12, 2025 and published on March 14, 2025, and it moves from "who is on the list" to "what being on the list requires", covering information security, prudential conditions around the custody of virtual assets, and the separation of client assets from the provider's own.
Two dates in it matter operationally. Article 3 of the transitional Título XVIII it incorporates makes those requirements enforceable against providers already registered at the time it took effect from December 31, 2025. Article 4 of that same title suspended the admission of new registration applications from the moment of publication until the resolution entered into force, which is the kind of provision that quietly reorders a market-entry plan.
What these rules do not say
They do not authorize anyone to hold deposits, and they do not convert a registered provider into a bank. They do not address whether a given stablecoin is a security, which is a separate question under different rules. And they do not tell a foreign company whether its particular arrangement brings it inside Argentine jurisdiction, which depends on facts about where customers are and how the service is offered rather than on a rule you can read off a page.
That last point is the one worth being careful about. Describing what a norm says is a different activity from advising whether it applies to you, and this post only does the first. Anyone deciding whether to register in Argentina should be doing so with counsel admitted there.
Where Argentina sits regionally
Argentina, Brazil and Mexico arrived at supervision of virtual asset providers by three different routes: Argentina through its anti-money-laundering statute with the securities regulator applying it, Brazil through a dedicated statute with the central bank designated afterwards, and Mexico through its fintech law years earlier. The practical effect on a company operating across the region is that "we are registered in Latin America" is not a sentence that means anything. Each registration is national, and each one covers a different set of activities.
For a payments business, the relevant question is which entity in each country performs which leg, and where that entity is registered. The countries where our own local rails are live are listed on the coverage page, and the jurisdictions where onboarding is possible are on the supported countries page.
When Argentina is the wrong first market
If your volume is concentrated in Brazil and Mexico, adding Argentina because the regulation now exists is the wrong order of operations. Regulatory clarity is a reason to be able to operate somewhere, not a reason to want to.
The rate of change is its own cost. A framework whose substantive requirements were added a year after the registry, with an entry window suspended in between, is a framework that will keep moving, and each move consumes compliance attention that a smaller market may not repay. I have a bias here and it is worth stating: I would rather be late into a market with a settled rulebook than early into one where the rulebook is still being written, because the second position spends its budget on re-reading rather than on customers. That bias costs something when a market opens early and rewards the first movers, and I have watched competitors make the opposite bet and do well with it. It is a preference about where to spend attention, not a claim about who is right.
What a payments business actually has to decide
Lumx is stablecoin payments infrastructure for businesses that move money between Latin America and the rest of the world: one API to collect, hold, convert, and pay out in BRL, MXN, COP, USD, EUR, and GBP or in USDC and USDT, over local rails such as PIX, SPEI, PSE, ACH, FEDWIRE, SEPA, and Faster Payments, with SWIFT and on-behalf-of payments and collections (POBO and COBO) in USD, EUR, and GBP, plus named virtual accounts, custodial wallets, and KYB/KYC built in.
The decision a company faces in a market like this one is not whether stablecoins are permitted, which the rules above already answer. It is which entity performs the regulated leg, and whether that entity is yours. A business that converts and pays out through a provider is buying that provider's regulatory position in each country, and the diligence question that follows is the one worth asking out loud: which entity, under which authorization, for which leg. A provider that cannot answer that per country is answering it for you by default.
The corollary for Argentina specifically is that a company reading this post to decide whether to register should notice that the answer depends on what it does, not on what it holds. The activity list in article 4 bis is the test, and it is written in terms of acting on behalf of another person. Our operator map sets out how the legs decompose across a cross-border flow.
Methodology and sources
Every norm cited here was retrieved and read on September 24, 2026, in the official publication rather than in secondary coverage. Resolución General 994/2024 and Resolución General 1058/2025 were read in the Boletín Oficial de la República Argentina, including their operative articles and their recitals. Ley 27.739 and Ley 25.246 are cited as they appear in the recitals and operative text of those resolutions, which is where the article numbers and the publication date of March 15, 2024 come from.
One thing was deliberately left out. Secondary sources describe a schedule of compliance deadlines differentiated by whether the provider is an individual, a domestic company or a foreign company. Those dates could not be confirmed in the official text within this review, so they are not reproduced here. A date that matters is a date worth reading in the original.
Verified on September 25, 2026. Operational context, not legal, tax, or investment advice. Resolución General 994/2024 (CNV) checked against boletinoficial.gob.ar on September 24, 2026. Resolución General 1058/2025 (CNV) checked against boletinoficial.gob.ar on September 24, 2026.
Cover photo: boris misevic on Unsplash.
Are stablecoins legal in Argentina?
Holding and using them is not prohibited, and the regulation addresses the businesses that provide services around them rather than the assets themselves. A company that exchanges, transfers, holds or administers virtual assets for others falls within a defined category under Ley 25.246 as amended, and the CNV maintains the corresponding registry.
Who regulates virtual asset service providers in Argentina?
The Comisión Nacional de Valores, the securities regulator, which article 37 of Ley 27.739 designates for this purpose. That is a different institutional choice from Brazil, where the central bank was designated, and the difference matters when comparing what each registration actually covers.
Does a company need to register to accept stablecoin payments for its own products?
The activity list in the law is written in terms of performing services on behalf of another person, which is the distinction that usually decides this. A merchant receiving payment for its own goods is in a different position from a platform moving money for third parties. Where a specific arrangement falls is a question for local counsel rather than for a blog post.
How stable is this framework?
Less than Brazil's, on the evidence. The registry was created in March 2024 and its substantive requirements arrived in March 2025, with new applications suspended in between and the requirements becoming enforceable at the end of 2025. Anyone planning around it should verify the current position rather than relying on a summary, including this one.
