🇦🇷 Devconnect Buenos Aires 2025 Recap

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🚞 A City that Lives and Breathes Crypto

Let’s give a warm welcome to all the new Frontera subscribers joining us! Thank you for attending our events, it was a blast.

This week, our teams from Espacio Cripto, Bando, and Odisea were on the ground in Buenos Aires for Devconnect 2025.

Argentina’s capital was the perfect host. A city that genuinely lives and breathes crypto, where people both understand and need the technology. And beyond the ecosystem, BA is gorgeous. Its combination of European-style architecture, late-night energy, and some of the best food in the continent that may come second to none.

What follows is a recap of the key events we hosted and what went down during this action-packed week.

⚽️ Uniswap Cup

We kicked off Devconnect on Sunday with the Uniswap Cup, a one-day football tournament that might just be the best crypto event I've ever been to. 

Hats off to the Uniswap team, they organized a 32-team soccer showdown featuring the most important projects from across the ecosystem (the Ethereum Foundation, Uniswap Labs, World, Morpho, of course Espacio Cripto and Odisea, and more). 

The atmosphere was incredible, with choripanes, milanesas, empanadas, and ice cold beers waiting on the sidelines as builders bonded over goals.

Our run was a mix of highs and heartbreaks. We dropped the first match against Celo. Then rallied to win the second against Aave, where I scored a brace, including one of the best goals of my career, and celebrated right in front of Stani and the crowd (if anyone has the video send it to me).

We then fell to Arbitrum in the third and missed classifying from the group stage, ending our dreams of glory. In the end, zkSync took home the trophy, big congrats to them and shoutout to Alcito.

The event was a perfect blend of crypto and argentine culture, and I can't wait to run it back next year.

👾 Consumer Payments Forum + Meet Monad

On Monday, we co-hosted two events with Monad that turned out to be one of the week’s highlights. 

The day started with the Consumer Payments Forum, an institutional-focused summit powered by Monad, Bitso Business, and Espacio Cripto, focused on how crypto rails are reshaping payments in LATAM. 

The venue was packed, and the lineup was world-class with speakers from Tether, Takenos, Belo, Mercado Bitcoin, Bitso, Etherfuse, Capa, and more.

I shared my key takeaways on X, but ill leave the most important ones here again:

• Manuel, CEO of Belo, was asked how crypto-enabled products will keep growing when banks are building the same things. His answer was that they rely on regulation, that’s their moat. It takes 3 years to get a fintech license in Mexico, 3 months in Argentina, R$10M in Brazil. Startups don’t have the time or cash. But once regulation catches up in the rest of the world, it’ll be “super easy to f*ck them up”. The crypto-powered banking experience is already 10x better.

• And who wins? Those balancing education and UX. Manuel himself said the best way to learn is to use. With a good enough product you don’t need instructions, you don’t even need to mention crypto. Mass adoption will come through abstraction. Look at the new Aave app, they know.

• How do you compete against Tether as a stablecoin issuer? Nick, CEO of Agora, says you go after the next 100x drivers: stablecoin neobanks, RWAs, credit, onchain FX, and zero-to-one startups. Not that these areas are overlooked, but they allow you to coexist by channeling energy into innovation.

After a full day of panels and conversations, the venue flipped into Meet Monad, an open, relaxed hangout with great food, drinks, and merch. It was the perfect setting to unwind and talk with the Monad team and other builders. 

To cap the night, the Monad crew took the Espacio Cripto team out to Tigre Morado for good sushi, good wine, and even better stories. Eunice and Tina know what I mean.

🕺 Superconductor Vol. 2

Devconnect also had its share of partying, and Superconductor Vol. 2 delivered on that front. Hosted by Privy and Bridge and presented by Espacio Cripto and Bando, Superconductor kept the energy flowing late. 

If you thought the first Superconductor edition we threw in Mexico City (after Bitso’s Stablecoin Summit) was great, Buenos Aires truly took it up a notch. The night was a huge success with over 1000+ registrations and top fintech and stablecoin builders showing up.

And it proved once again that some of the best networking can happen on the dance floor.

🌎 Devconnect Highlights

Aside from our own events, Devconnect’s main program and other side events brought big announcements and forward-looking updates:

• Our very own Ab pitched Bando live on stage on Base Batches’ Demo Day, a pathway for builders to turn their idea into a product and kickstart their business, on Base. Bando is an API that turns companies into Fintech 3.0s by integrating crypto rails. Listen to the pitch (min 58:10 here), and if you're a VC as hyped up as I am, send Ab a DM because we're raising for our seed round. 

• Jesse Pollak gave a talk on the importance of local stablecoins, a topic we at Frontera have covered extensively (read our thesis here). He announced that Ripio is launching wARS on Base, a new stablecoin pegged to the Argentine peso, as a part of Base’s push to move everything local onchain. 

• Jesse also shouted out Bando during that same presentation, praise from the very best. We're always present and always building.

• At Polygon’s Money Rails summit, the headline news was that Revolut, Europe’s largest neobank, is integrating Polygon to enable crypto-powered remittances, payments, trading, and staking. This is another clear case of the transition from Fintech 2.0 to Fintech 3.0 we've been nonstop yapping about. It's inevitable. Revolut’s 65+ million users across 38 countries (including 14M crypto users) can now send money on-chain with near-zero fees, pay on Polygon, trade and stake crypto, and off-ramp to fiat.
  

• Aave announced its new retail-focused DeFi app, offering up to 9% yield on savings, bank-style simplicity, and deposit protection up to $1M, marking a clear push to bring everyday users into onchain finance through abstraction and clean UX.

• Peanut won the Crecimiento Startup World Cup after beating out 200+ teams as a self-custodial wallet that lets people send money via WhatsApp, SMS, or QR without the recipient needing an account, using a Pix-like UX to drive real crypto adoption.

• Last but not least, we’re gearing up for Odisea’s ETH/ACC Demo Day tomorrow, which will close out Devconnect by bringing the region’s top Ethereum startups on stage to pitch to VCs, creating a launchpad for LatAm’s next wave of builders and a final push of collaboration, capital, and community.

🌌 Now What?

In sum, Devconnect 2025 in Buenos Aires was a showcase of how far the crypto ecosystem has come in LatAm, and where it’s headed next. To me, the direction is clear.

I know Bitcoin is double-digit percent down these past few days, but that changes nothing. We've created tech that can change the world. And we won't stop building until we do.

At least us at Bando.

I leave Devconnect energized, knowing that so much of what we've been writing about at Frontera is starting to play out in real time. The momentum is real, the builders are here, and the region is waking up to what's possible.

Let's ride.