🇨🇴 Fintechs are Dead. Long Live Finchains

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Your weekly dose of data-driven crypto insights from the Latin American frontier. 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 LatAm.

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And don't miss this week's guest podcast with Will Duran, co-CEO of Minteo, where he breaks down their pivot from NFTs to stablecoins and their product, COPM, a Colombian peso stablecoin.

This Edition is Presented by Bitso’s Stablecoin Conference

Frontera is an official media partner of Bitso’s Stablecoin Conference 2025.

We’ll be on the ground in Mexico City this August 27–28, covering the builders, the breakthroughs, and ideas reshaping LatAm’s financial future.

Use the code FRONTERA10 for 10% off your ticket here. See you there.

📲 From Fintech to Finchain

Latin America’s fintech giants brought banking to the smartphone. Nubank alone now serves around 120M customers. Mercado Pago processed $58.3B in a single quarter.

These platforms proved that banking could leap from branch lines to smartphone screens. Yet, for all of their innovation, these fintechs still run on traditional rails: bank deposits, card networks, and siloed domestic payment systems.

The next stage of their transformation goes beyond digitalization. It redefines the architecture of financial services, where local currencies no longer sit idle in banks, but circulate as stablecoins on public blockchains, programmable and interoperable by design.

It's time for modern companies to go onchain.

It's time for the rise of the finchain.

⛓️ What are Finchains?

I'm borrowing the term from Will Duran, founder and co-CEO of Minteo, to describe the evolution of finance: fintechs built directly on public blockchains.

Finchains deliver the familiar traditional products (payments, savings, lending, trading), but replace legacy banking infrastructure with an onchain stack. 

Value is represented by fiat-backed stablecoins. Wallets serve as user accounts. Transactions settle on blockchains. Smart contracts automate flows. Compliance layers still sit on top, but once tokenized, everything runs onchain.

Why make the switch? Well, if you want a one-word answer: efficiency.

Finchains inherit crypto’s native advantages: 24/7 instant settlement, programmable flows, global interoperability, composability, and lower costs. All while preserving the smooth UX that made fintechs scale through tech abstraction.

The problem is, unlocking this model in Latin America still requires one missing piece: local stablecoins.

🤦‍♂️ Local Stablecoins Again!?

I know, I know, I'm sorry. 

If you're an avid Frontera reader you know we've been writing nonstop about local stablecoins. I'm just too bullish, I can't help it. 

But hear me out:

Local stablecoins unlock finchains.

Latin American finchains can't run on USDT alone. Sure, dollar stablecoins help users hedge inflation, but they also dollarize onchain activity and disconnect it from local economies.

Every time a user in Colombia cashes out to USDC, that value exits the domestic system. The bridge between crypto and everyday commerce breaks.

Local stablecoins, tokens pegged to pesos, reales, or soles, solve that. They keep value in national currencies and enable financial services that actually plug into the economy.

We've already covered the full upside of local stablecoins in past essays:

• The Local Stablecoin Thesis

• The Stablecoin Sandwich

So I won't go into too much detail here. This piece is about something else: finchains, and why without local stablecoins, they simply don't work.

Without local onchain liquidity, you're stuck. Finchains don't just benefit from local stablecoins. They depend on them.

Until those tokens exist at scale, the finchain stack can't run.

💰 Finchain Revenue Opportunities

But let's imagine, just for a moment, that the finchain stack is real.

Local stablecoins exist at scale. Now what?

Now entirely new business models open up.

If fintechs built multi-billion-dollar companies with digital banking, finchains have an even broader canvas, blending traditional financial flows with crypto-native rails.

Here’s how they can make money (from TradFi to degen):