🇲🇽 Boots on the Ground at Bitso’s Stablecoin Conference

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Your weekly dose of data-driven crypto insights from the edges of the world. Trusted by leaders at Bitso, Binance, the Solana Foundation, the Ethereum Foundation, and more.

This is where you start if you’re building, investing, or scaling in frontier markets.

Don't miss this week's podcast with Yoseph from Lava, where he walks us through backing early stage startups in Africa.

🌎 New Frontera Format

Wait, Joker, what's happening? Where's the essay?

Well…

We’re making some changes at Frontera!

From now on, we’ll only publish one podcast per week, alternating between guest interviews and our new discussion format featuring Ab, Cush, and Simon Chamorro from Alliance.

But don't fret, lower frequency means higher quality content, so for you, our readers, that's great.

As for the newsletter, we'll also alternate between the long-format essays you all know and love, and curated coverage of the most important developments across frontier markets.

This also just means I have more time to ponder, research, and produce even better thought pieces (which is hard to imagine).

From the bottom of my heart, thank you guys for reading, sharing, and believing in what we’re building.

Big things are coming.

🇲🇽 Boots on the Ground at Bitso’s Stablecoin Conference

From what you can infer from the image above, we were (Ab included), boots on the ground, at Bitso’s Stablecoin Conference, Mexico's first event dedicated exclusively to stablecoins.

Let me tell you guys, it was a blast. 

The two day summit brought together top builders, founders, investors, and regulators to dive deep into stablecoins, or as it was made clear, the future of money.

I could walk you through the announcements and headlines (more on that below), but instead, I’d rather share the insights I picked up from listening to the panels and wandering the halls:

• Tech always finds a way. This means the world adopts better technology because it has to. That’s my read on the conference, stablecoins have now found their way. 

• Vogel compared money to water flowing down a mountain, it always finds the fastest route. That route is also stablecoins.

• It’s jam packed. Everyone wants in and everyone wants to build. But there won’t, and can't be too many winners. There's space for some, but not all.

• Still, LatAm in 2025 is SF in 1848. There’s a gold rush for infra. And an insane amount of talented builders chasing it. Shout out to those guys.

• You ain’t seen nothin yet. Stablecoins WILL replace traditional systems, but this is just the beginning. New use cases we haven’t even imagined will emerge.

• Distribution is king. Circle wants their own L1. Stripe wants their own L1. Why would they settle for a partner when they can own the full stack?

And these are just from Day 1, Day 2 is coming tomorrow on my X account, and I’ll make sure to retweet it from Frontera too.

Oh, and how could I forget. 

One of the best moments of the Stablecoin Conference was seeing the Frontera Avengers bullpost local stablecoins.

Shoutout to Ben, Raj, Dave, Will, and Thomaz. More on that soon too.

🇲🇽 Mexico

🇲🇽 Bitso Business expands to Chile and Peru

Bitso Business, Bitso’s B2B arm, announced its launch in Chile and Peru, alongside two corporate stablecoin solutions: FXaaS (foreign exchange as a service) and Pay with Bitso.

🇲🇽 Bitso releases institutional stablecoin report

During the conference Bitso also dropped their new report on 1,300 institutional clients showing how stablecoin payments in LatAm doubled in H1 2025 vs 2024.

🇲🇽 MXNB Hackathon Winners Announced

Juno unveiled the winners of the MXNB hackathon at the conference: Kustodia for payments, RoomFi for DeFi, and ZamnaSec for open Arbitrum.

🇲🇽 The Stablecoin Conference Returns in 2026

On more Bitso news, Imran Ahmad, GM of Bitso Business, confirmed the conference will return in 2026 after its successful debut in Mexico City, setting the stage for another major gathering during the World Cup.

🇨🇴 Colombia

🇨🇴 COPM hits $212M in 30d transfers

Local stablecoin issuer Minteo reached $212M in 30-day transfer volume, a 69% increase over the previous month. How many times do we have to teach you this lesson, old man?