🛕 Frontera’s Pyramid of Adoption

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And don't miss this week's podcast where we sat down with Thomaz Teixeira, CEO of BRL1, to discuss the future of local stablecoins and what makes BRL1 unique.

 🍾 Solving Crypto’s Biggest Bottleneck

On June 6 2025, a single, plain-old, random day of the year, more than 227M payments coursed through Brazil’s Pix. 

In less than five years, this free, instant-transfer system has become the country’s default way to move money, now used by 92% of Brazilian adults.

Many think of Pix as just another payment method, we see it as a case study in solving crypto’s biggest bottleneck…

Adoption.

You see, crypto already has its poster boy, its trojan horse, its QB1: stablecoins.

Yes, they already move trillions. But billions still don't use them. Why is this?

The answer is simple, and often ignored, great UX.

The key to onboarding the first billion users is an interface so effortless it disappears into daily life. So simple it actually optimizes a way of doing something, changing previous user behavior.

Americans often assume the world needs a “global Venmo,” but the truth is, the winning product will look more like a “global Pix”.

This insight led us to frame stablecoin adoption as a hierarchy of needs, let me explain.

🛕 Frontera’s Pyramid of Adoption

Think of adoption as a pyramid, each layer must be satisfied before the next can thrive, much like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

This is the Frontera Pyramid of Adoption:

In our model, the base is the Experience, above it is the Asset, and at the top is the Network. Let’s break it down:

1. Experience (Base – UX): 

The interface and process by which people pay. This is the app, wallet, or system the user interacts with. It's essentially how easy (or hard) it is to send and receive value in everyday life. If paying someone feels off, people simply won’t do it, no matter the asset or blockchain behind it. Intuitive UX, instant settlement, and zero friction are non-negotiable.

2. Asset (Middle – Currency): 

What people are transacting in, be it a local currency stablecoin, a USD stablecoin, or something else. Once the UX is seamless, users care about what they’re holding and spending. The asset needs to match their needs: stability, familiarity, and usefulness.

3. Network (Top – Rails):

The underlying system that moves the asset. It could be a blockchain or even traditional rails like local instant payment networks. This layer competes on speed, cost, and connectivity, but it’s largely invisible to the end-user when the experience is done right.

The crypto industry has tended to obsess over assets (launching tokens, shinier ponzis) and networks (faster L1s and L2s), while often neglecting the experience. 

Just as Maslow’s higher needs only matter after basic needs are met, the best asset or fastest network means little if everyday users can’t easily access and trust the system.

The base layer must be cracked first.

⚽️ Brazil as a Case Study

Brazil is the clearest example of that. 

In late 2020, the Central Bank launched Pix and required every bank and fintech to integrate it. That mandate meant that overnight, more than 200M Brazilians could access a new way to move money instantly.

But out of all countries and all payment methods, why focus on Brazil's Pix? Well, from a user's perspective, the design of Pix is striking in its simplicity.

To transfer or receive payments, you just have to input a “Pix key,” which can be a phone number, email, or national ID, and be done in seconds.

To pay a merchant, all they need to do is scan a QR code in their banking app, and the transaction settles immediately at almost no cost. 

Think about everything you have to do to send money to a friend in your country with a real bank. Now imagine just writing down their email, or scanning a code. 

It's that simple.

What makes Pix even more remarkable is that it didn’t replace credit or debit cards, it expanded the entire market.

The data shows card transactions continued to grow steadily, while Pix shot past them, reaching over 8B payments in a single quarter (in 2023). 

Instead of cannibalizing existing rails, it created new demand by lowering friction and making payments accessible to everyone, everywhere. 

That is the critical lesson for stablecoins: the right experience multiplies usage. A “global Pix” for stablecoins would unlock entirely new money flows, on top of what already exists.

📹 The Experience -> The Base

Let's go back to Fronteras Pyramid of Adoption now.

At the base is the experience, which as you can see now, is the single biggest unlock for stablecoin adoption.

Crypto’s UX is still far too convoluted for the mainstream. Opening a Web3 wallet feels like learning a foreign language: seed phrases, network fees, chains to choose from. Even simple payments often require buying ETH for gas or bridging tokens across blockchains. 

The industry’s roots in speculation have led to products that prioritize gambling and power users over everyday usability.

If a checkout page is confusing, if gas fees pop up, or if a wallet connection fails, the average user will simply give up and close the app. And who can blame them? 

This contrast is why Pix’s success is so instructive. They nailed UX by stripping payments down to a few taps: open your banking app, enter an amount, point your camera at a QR code (or select a contact’s phone/email), and you’re done. 

By eliminating friction (fees, delays, bank details, tech) Pix removed the psychological and practical barriers to going cashless.

That’s the first chasm you must cross.

📼 The Asset -> The Middle

The second, once, and only once you have nailed the experience, is the asset.

Why would your grandma pay for groceries in Bitcoin? Why would your friend settle a debt in XPL?

They won’t. People won’t suddenly adopt our coins just because they exist, or because they have 10,000 TPS.

Yeah, sure, they'll go up. I'm long. But they're not the right asset to transact in. The right asset is the one people already trust and mentally use as a unit of account.

Once the UX is solved, people will naturally demand the assets that make sense for them, and the crypto ecosystem must be ready to provide those stable, familiar units of value.

This is where local stablecoins come in. Take BRL1, for instance. Its CEO, Thomaz Teixeira, sat down with us to explain the vision: making local stablecoins a natural extension of how Brazilians already move money through institutional-level security and continuous liquidity.

As it should be.

It’s part of the thesis we’ve been writing about for months now. Adoption won’t come from forcing global tokens onto local users, but from wrapping crypto rails smoothly around the currencies they already live and think in.

🎞️ The Network -> The Top

At the top of the pyramid sits the network, the rails that actually move the money.

In crypto, this means blockchains like Ethereum, Solana, Base, or Plasma; in the fiat world, it’s systems like Brazil's Pix or Mexico’s SPEI.

Networks matter for cost and performance, but only after the first two layers are solved. To users, they are invisible infrastructure: nobody wonders if their Pix payment rides on RTGS or if their stablecoin settled on Solana. They just care that it’s fast, cheap, and reliable.

The competition among networks is fierce, more so in crypto, but it’s a battle fought beneath the surface. For the everyday user, the only thing that matters is that the money moves instantly and without friction.

Everything else is plumbing, and because of that, it goes last.

📺 The Pyramid Starts at the Bottom

Frontera’s Pyramid of Adoption – Experience → Asset → Network – reminds us that without a great UX, nothing else matters. Brazil’s Pix taught us that if you nail the experience, you can change a nation’s payment habits in a few years.

The industry's task is to create a “global Pix” equivalent, where sending stablecoins is as easy as sending a text. Do that, and billions of users will climb the pyramid naturally, holding the assets that make sense to them, on networks they don’t even need to know about. 

In the end, people won’t adopt crypto because it’s crypto; they’ll adopt it because it simply works better.

The pyramid starts at the bottom, and so must we.

🇧🇷 Brazil

🇧🇷 Nubank to test stablecoin payments on credit cards

Nubank, Latin America’s largest digital bank, plans to integrate USD-pegged stablecoins with its credit cards, beginning pilot tests to bridge traditional banking and tokenized assets.

🇲🇽 Mexico

🇲🇽 Etherfuse redefines onchain FX

Etherfuse CEO Dave Taylor argues crypto has misframed FX as just payments. His essay shows why Stablebonds could unlock real onchain FX.

🇦🇷 Argentina

🇦🇷 The Argentinian Peso hits record lows

Argentina’s central bank burned nearly $1B in reserves, its biggest move since 2019, to defend the peso as Milei’s reforms falter.

🇪🇺 Europe

🇪🇺 European banks to Launch Euro-stablecoin

A consortium of nine top European banks, including ING, UniCredit and CaixaBank, unveiled plans for a Euro-pegged stablecoin under EU’s MiCA regime.