🇻🇪 El Dorado: The Lost City of Gold

The P2P marketplace redefining how money moves

AuthorAuthor

Frontera EC & Joker
April 04, 2025

👋 Welcome to Frontera, the newsletter showcasing the reality of crypto in Latam. Join industry leaders from the Ethereum Foundation, the Solana Foundation, Binance, Crypto.com, dYdX, and others to discover why Latin America has become one of the most dynamic and promising regions in the crypto world and how you can tap into this market.

Frontera subs last edition: 154

Frontera subs this edition: 157

If you want to build products, invest, or grow in LATAM, this is your place. 

Listen to the full episode here.

This edition is presented by Bando

🚀 Unlock seamless Web3 spending with Bando: The Onchain Spending Protocol!

Easily integrate our customizable widget in minutes to enable your dApp, Wallet, or AI Agent to let users spend tokens on gaming, retail, travel and more.

Ready to revolutionize your platform? 

🇻🇪 El Dorado: The Lost City of Gold

In Latin American lore, El Dorado is the mythical Lost City of Gold, where untold riches await those brave enough to seek it.

Today, the Lost City of Gold is no longer just a legend. It's a reality being built right before our eyes: El Dorado is a peer-to-peer stablecoin marketplace turned super-app reshaping the financial landscape in Latin America.

In a region plagued by fragmented liquidity and limited access to efficient payment systems, El Dorado offers a decentralized solution that allows users to trade and exchange freely, bypassing traditional financial barriers.

This deep dive explores El Dorado's origins and growth, its unique P2P model, why it's thriving in Latam’s fragmented financial jungle, and where the trail leads next.

⚜️ Origins and Growth

Born out of necessity in the heart of Latin America, El Dorado set out to address one of the region’s most pressing issues: access to stable currencies and the ability to easily transact across borders.

El Dorado was founded in 2020 by Guillermo Goncalvez and Juan Carlos Andreu after experiencing hyperinflation firsthand in Venezuela, where yearly rates reached up to a million percent. They recognized how stablecoins could provide a reliable store of value and enable frictionless cross-border payments. 

Their vision: to create a platform that gives Latin Americans easy access to stable, dollar-backed currencies, with a P2P marketplace that connects the region's fragmented financial systems.

The Lost City of Gold was never lost, only waiting to be built:

  • Over 1M app downloads on the Google Play Store.

  • Processed 4M transactions for 120,000 active users across 7 countries in 2024.

  • Went from 0 to $2.7M in ARR in just 2 years.

  • Raised $3M in seed funding from Multicoin Capital and Coinbase Ventures.

  • Ranked among the top 5 finance apps in Venezuela.

🌞 El Dorado’s Golden Differentiator

El Dorado’s peer-to-peer model is its main differentiator, a strategy that stands out against both traditional fintechs and other crypto platforms in Latin America.

Instead of acting as a bank or centralized exchange, El Dorado functions as a matchmaker: it connects users who have local currency to those who have stablecoins, letting them trade directly. 

Here's how their P2P model works:

  • Breadth of Payment Rails: El Dorado connects local payment methods across Latam by delegating fiat transfers to its users. Any app or bank transfer that two users agree to use can become a rail for exchange, allowing an unparalleled variety of payment options.

  • Lower Fees, Better Rates: By cutting out middlemen, El Dorado offers fees between 0.24% to 1.23%, depending on the amount transacted, far below the 6% charged by traditional services.

  • Escrow System: The platform uses an escrow system to ensure secure transactions between buyers and sellers, protecting both parties in the process. 

  • Super-app Features: El Dorado isn't just a marketplace, it offers a self-custodial wallet, crypto swaps, gasless stablecoin transfers, and yield-bearing stablecoins.

🐆 Latam’s Fragmented Financial Jungle

Latin America’s financial landscape is famously fragmented. This context is crucial to understand why El Dorado’s P2P approach thrives where a one-size-fits-all solution might falter. 

The region spans 33 countries using 39 different currencies, each with distinct banking systems. Unlike Europe, which has the unified SEPA/IBAN system, or the U.S. with its nationwide solutions, Latam lacks a single interoperable payment network. 

Mexico has SPEI, Brazil has Pix, Colombia uses Nequi, in Venezuela, people rely on Zelle… you get the idea.

In the United States, while there are various payment apps (PayPal, CashApp, Venmo), the vast majority of banks are connected through common networks (ACH for bank transfers, card networks for payments, and Zelle for instant P2P). In Europe, the SEPA system allows you to transfer euros seamlessly across the continent with one standard account number.

Quantitatively, the difference is striking. Over 70 distinct payment rails exist in Latam, compared to just a handful in the U.S. or EU.

🧩 How El Dorado’s Model Solves the Puzzle

Latin America’s liquidity problem is precisely why El Dorado’s P2P model shines. It bridges the gaps left by Latin America’s fragmented financial landscape by leveraging stablecoins. In doing so, El Dorado creates a universal medium for value exchange, turning regional liquidity into an interconnected marketplace. 

This is where the pieces start to fit:

Interoperability Through Stablecoins

By operating entirely with USDT on Tron and Arbitrum, El Dorado bypasses the region’s 33 different countries and 70 payment methods, achieving interoperability. This allows users to transact in stable, digital dollars, regardless of their local currency.

Delegated Payments, Local Liquidity

What truly unlocks liquidity is delegation. Instead of building costly integrations in every country, El Dorado lets its users handle the payment rails. This design allows the platform to scale quickly without touching fiat, and without regulatory bottlenecks.

Market-Driven Exchange Rates

Quick scaling means more users, and more users mean more liquidity providers competing in the marketplace. And El Dorado doesn't set the prices, users do. As demand increases, the exchange rates improve, creating a healthy feedback loop that snowballs growth. 

El Dorado's model doesn't fix the broken system, it draws strength from its cracks. And through them, it's quietly building the most efficient value network in Latin America.

🛣️ Where the Trail Leads Next

El Dorado now holds what everyone chases but few truly possess: not gold, but insight. 

In a region defined by friction and fragmentation, they’ve built a map of how money actually moves. With every transaction, they’ve gathered data on payment flows, corridor volume, currency behavior, and user preferences, information that no one else has at this scale.

And now, they’re in a position to act on it:

Turning Insight into Infrastructure

El Dorado knows what works, and they can double down on it. With a growing user base and marketplace volume, they are well positioned to onboard institutional players and deepen liquidity. More volume means tighter spreads, better rates, and the ability to support business-scale flows.

DeFi Expansion

The leap to DeFi is already underway. With crypto swaps and yield-bearing stablecoins live in-app, the next step is unlocking a full suite of decentralized tools: trading, lending, and borrowing, all powered by a wallet users already trust. El Dorado has the liquidity and the rails, now it's about offering full financial autonomy.

New Markets

Because El Dorado doesn’t rely on banking integrations, its model can scale across borders with fewer constraints. Mexico, home to the world's largest remittance corridor at $64.7B annually, is the next obvious destination, followed by Chile. Beyond Latam, Sub-Saharan Africa is on the horizon: the fastest-growing crypto region in the world, with a YoY growth rate of nearly 45%. The frontier is wide open.

El Dorado's P2P model isn’t just the future of payments, it’s a blueprint for financial sovereignty.

The Lost City of Gold has finally been found.

📰 Latam Crypto News 📰

🗺️ Latam

Santiago Roel’s Inversion is kicking off its strategy in Latin America by acquiring traditional businesses and moving them onchain to streamline operations. Its goal: build a better acquisition funnel and onboard 100M+ users to crypto through mobile and banking.

Why Latam? Because everyone wants dollars, remittances are a massive market, and the crypto UX is still broken. Next week at Frontera, we'll break down their approach and predict where they're headed next. Subscribe here to stay ahead.

Base Batches kicks off April 25 with six global buildathons, including one in LatAm (April 25–May 11). Local builders will compete to join an incubator and pitch for a share of up to $1M. The program aims to support the next wave of onchain apps, offering funding, mentorship, and visibility to top teams worldwide.

🇧🇷 Brazil

Nubank expands its crypto offering by listing Cardano (ADA), NEAR Protocol (NEAR), Cosmos (ATOM), and Algorand (ALGO), boosting access to digital assets for over 110 million users across Latin America.

According to the 1st National Crypto Survey by Hashdex and Coinbase, 15% of Brazilians now invest in crypto, making it the 5th most popular investment, behind savings, real estate, cash, and investment  funds. More Brazilians are investing in crypto than stocks (6%) and dollars (14%).

🇦🇷 Argentina

Argentina’s prosecutor is investigating President Milei and his sister for potential misuse of funds linked to the LIBRA scandal.

🇸🇻 El Salvador

At MERGE BA, Nolvia Serrano said clear crypto regulations are helping El Salvador attract investment and position itself as a regional hub for blockchain innovation.

👤 Guest Episode 👤

In this week’s guest episode, we sat down with Guillermo from El Dorado to discuss how they're revolutionizing DeFi in emerging markets through P2P stablecoin payments.

Watch the full conversation here 👇