🇲🇽 Fintech 3.0: The Great Platform Shift in Mexico

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🇲🇽 Our Biggest Effort Yet

I know I said last week the surprise announcement was coming on Monday… but then it wasn’t going to be a surprise, no?

Well, this is it.

We’re launching our biggest effort yet:

Fintech 3.0: The Great Platform Shift in Mexico, an in-depth look at how the foundation of finance is being rebuilt.

For decades, fintech meant digitizing banks or building software on top of them. Today, that model is being replaced.

The money ledger, once locked inside banks, is moving to open, programmable blockchains. Stablecoins are becoming the base layer of the new financial internet. Payments that used to take days clear in seconds. Dollars that once sat in bank databases now live in self-custodied wallets. 

Just as electricity replaced candles and mobile replaced desktop, blockchains are replacing the financial rails built by banks.

The technology, liquidity, and user demand needed to power this shift have finally arrived.

The rest of this edition is an excerpt from our upcoming report, and as we develop it fully, we want to hear from you, the founders, operators, and investors shaping the future of finance. Help us by answering this short form and telling us what insights or questions you’d like to see addressed.

🌐 What is Fintech 3.0?

To understand Fintech 3.0, we need to look at what came before. 

Fintech 1.0

The first wave of fintech was about bringing finance online. 

In the 1990s and early 2000s, companies like Paypal made consumers comfortable with digital money for the first time. Online banking portals and early e-commerce payments marked the start of financial digitization.

The goal was simple, to make existing financial services available through the internet. But banks still controlled the ledgers, and money moved through the same closed systems, only now with a digital interface on top. A small innovation big enough to change everything.

Fintech 2.0

The second wave built software on top of banks.

In the 2010s, startups like Stripe, Plaid, Brex, and Chime transformed banking connectivity through APIs, giving rise to the era of embedded finance, where Banking-as-a-Service providers opened access to cards, accounts, and payments through programmable layers.

This model democratized access to financial tools and powered a Cambrian explosion of new apps, from digital wallets to lending platforms. Millions of users gained access to better, faster, mobile-first financial experiences.

But under the hood, everything still ran on outdated banking rails built decades ago, slow fragmented, and closed systems that limited true innovation. The infrastructure evolved, yet the core infrastructure remained the same.

Fintech 3.0

The third wave is fundamentally different (2020s). Fintech 3.0 is about rebuilding finance from scratch on open and programmable blockchains.

In this new era, the ledger is moving from banks to public networks. Stablecoins act as digital dollars, payments settle instantly across borders, and users hold their assets in self-custodied wallets instead of government-controlled bank accounts.

Fintechs no longer need to connect to banks. They can connect to smart contracts and onchain liquidity, creating a system that runs at the speed of the internet. This shift unlocks what legacy rails could never achieve: programmable money, global interoperability, and transactions that operate every hour of every day.

Fintech 2.0 linked to banks, Fintech 3.0 links to the internet of money itself. APIs now connect directly to protocols instead of institutions, and money becomes composable, capable of moving, earning yield, and interacting with digital assets anywhere in the world.

We borrow these definitions from the Y Combinator x Coinbase “Build Onchain” Request for Startups, which precisely outlines the three stages of fintech’s evolution and invites founders to build the next generation of financial infrastructure.

The RFS calls on founders to create companies that don't yet exist, startups born natively onchain that can outcompete and outperform today's Fintech 2.0 products.

Going from zero to one is one way to win, but established fintechs already have what most startups dream of: distribution, users, and trust. The next step is upgrading their infrastructure stack to paddle early and catch the third wave as it breaks instead of getting wiped out.

📡 Why the Shift is Inevitable

Several factors make this leap to Fintech 3.0 feel inevitable, a classic case of a technology reaching maturity and rendering the old infrastructure obsolete.

Today we have low-cost, high-speed blockchain networks, globally adopted stablecoins, easy-to-use digital wallets and growing mainstream crypto adoption. A few years ago, none of these pieces were ready. Now they are, which means the new platform can realistically challenge the old. The efficiency gains are simply too large to ignore.

Once a new technology enables an experience that is orders of magnitude better (faster, cheaper, more programmable), the market inevitably moves towards it.

History shows that platform shifts follow this pattern time and again:

Candles to Electricity

For centuries, candles were the only source of light after sunset, converting chemical energy from wax into light through combustion. They worked, but burned out quickly, produced smoke, couldn't scale beyond what a flame could reach.

The arrival of electricity changed how light itself was created. Instead of burning fuel, we learned to move energy through filaments, producing illumination instantly and cleanly.

Vacuum Tubes to Transistors

Vacuum tubes controlled electrical signals by heating metal filaments inside glass chambers, a process that consumed immense power and often failed under stress.

In 1947, the transistor replaced this fragile setup with solid-state semiconductors that could guide electron flow through silicon. Suddenly, machines that once filled entire rooms could fit on a desk. It made modern computing possible.

Desktop to Mobile

Computing began tethered to desks and power outlets, designed for a world where people occasionally went online. 

Then mobile devices arrived and reversed the relationship. Suddenly, the internet moved with you, integrated into your daily life. Every industry had to rebuild for a reality that was always connected.

Banking Networks to Blockchain Rails

The shift from closed banking networks to blockchain rails follows the same trajectory. Each prior transition became inevitable once the solution proved 10x better. 

Imagine willingly going back to candles, to horses, to rotary phones. It wouldn't happen. Once a better foundation exists, the world simply moves on.

We’re now at that point in finance. The combination of stablecoins and modern blockchains has outgrown the experimental phase and now performs better across core use cases like payments, savings, and cross-border transfers. This movement goes far beyond giving users access to crypto inside banking apps. 

Fintech 3.0 replaces the underlying infrastructure itself, the same way digital cameras didn’t upgrade film but erased the need for it. Blockchain networks are doing the same to legacy banking rails, introducing a system built for the internet age.

📊 Get Access to the Full Report

Like I said above, this is just the surface of our upcoming report, Fintech 3.0: The Great Platform Shift in Mexico.

The full version goes deeper into the numbers, founders, and uses cases driving the country's transition into blockchain rails.

Sign up here to get the report delivered to your inbox as soon as it goes live.