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- 📊 Our Read on Dune’s The Money Layer
📊 Our Read on Dune’s The Money Layer
What the data reveals... and what it doesn't
Frontera Bando & Joker
August 22, 2025
Real problems. Real solutions. Real data. This is Frontera.
Your weekly dose of data-driven crypto insights from the edges of the world. 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 frontier markets.
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And don't miss this week's guest podcast with Simon Chamorro, Head of Growth at Alliance, where he walks us through Alliance’s investment thesis in frontier markets.
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.
📸 An Onchain Snapshot of LatAm
Dune has drawn back the curtains on Latin America’s crypto economy, revealing, in raw data, the true scale of the region’s new financial layer.
The numbers don't lie. They surface what headlines often obscure, which is in this case, the quiet revolution playing out in wallets, contracts, and cross-border flows.
From the rise of stablecoin payments to the emergence of crypto-native neobank, Dune truly covers it all.
This article unpacks their The Money Layer: LATAM Crypto 2025 Report through our lens, offering insights into the geopolitical, infrastructural, and cultural implications of the most comprehensive onchain snapshot of Latin America to date.
🎬 The Money Layer
Dune’s The Money Layer: LATAM Crypto 2025 Report, authored by Filippo Armani, is the most detailed onchain analysis ever produced on Latin America's crypto scene.
Hats off to Filippo, the Dune team, and everyone who helped make it a reality. As a numbers nerd and onchain sleuth I appreciate the beauty of data, and understand the pain of collecting it in this industry.
You guys struck it outta the park.
Back to the report. It goes beyond speculation to quantify how crypto is used as a practical financial tool across the region. As our good friend Aaron Stanly said, “Latin America is ground zero for crypto usage”.
Because it is being used now. Not for speculation. Not for gambling. Not for investing. But to power everyday life for everyday people.
The team mapped that through verifiable custom dashboards across four core pillars:
Exchanges
Stablecoins
On/Off-ramps
Payment apps
Together, they form the “money layer”, the rails enabling crypto remittances, salaries, savings, and transactions bridging borders and currencies.
The Dune report relied on using publicly available wallet addresses from LatAm-based exchanges, stablecoins, and select apps, while also working with local projects to capture the clearest picture yet of the crypto as payment use case.
🍿 Our Favorite Facts
Spoiler alert.
If you haven't read the report yet, I highly recommend you to do so here, because there are spoilers coming right up, and because if you're reading Frontera, chances are you want to know everything about crypto in frontier markets.
Before giving our own insights, I'd like to highlight some facts that stood out:
Exchange flows grew 9x: Between 2021 and 2024, annual exchange-based volume in LatAm jumped from $3B to $27B.
Bitso’s scale: Bitso alone processed $25.2B in 2024, up from $1.96B in 2021, a wild, wild 1,185% increase.
Ethereum is king: From Jan 2021 to mid-2025, ~75% of all tracked LatAm exchange volume ($45.4B) moved through Ethereum.
Brazil's local stablecoin race: BRL-pegged stablecoins went from just over 5,000 transfers in 2021 to 1.4M in 2024 (+230x). Unique senders climbed from <800 to 90K in 2025, an 11x jump since 2023. Native volume reached 5B BRL (~$900M) by mid-2025, nearly matching the full 2024 total, with at least five tokens now in active competition.
Mexico is right behind: Peso-pegged stablecoins MXNB and MXNe saw volume grow from just $53K in July 2024 to $34M in July 2025, an insane 638x YoY increase.
Crypto infra is scaling: Since launch, Capa has processed $29.9M across 5,501 transactions. BlindPay has moved $93M in total volume across LatAm, with another $70M expected between July and August alone.
🎞️ Our Takeaways
This is where it gets good.
Beyond the data and the dashboards, there's also real value in the interpretation. What the numbers reveal… and what they hide.
It's time to zoom out and make sense of what The Money Layer tells us about the present, and the future of crypto in Latin America.
These are our takeaways:
The Great Contradiction: Dollarization vs. Digital Sovereignty
The report highlights a core tension that I can't take my mind off: the rise of USD stablecoins versus the early but rapid growth of local fiat-backed stablecoins.
This contradiction underscores two of Frontera’s core theses: “Stablecoins and the American Techno-Economic Conquest of the 21st Century” and “The Local Stablecoin Thesis”.
One one side, USDT and USDC are flooding the region. Over 90% of LatAm’s onchain volume flows through them, fueling a silent dollarization through the export of U.S. debt.
On the other, the explosive growth of BRL and MXN stablecoins (see my favorite fact #4), though still small, signals a counter-movement: the adoption of digital tools designed to defend monetary sovereignty.
Both futures are unfolding in parallel. One leads deeper into the empire of the dollar. While the other tries to chart a path of self-determination. Whichever wins may be what defines the global economic order for years to come.
The Race for Local Stablecoin Dominance
If local stablecoins are part of the antidote against dollarization, someone's gotta issue them, right?
In Brazil alone, at least five BRL-pegged coins are live, but none dominate. BRLA leads in senders, cReal in transfers, and BRZ in volume.
In my eyes, the race is wide open.
The winner will need deep liquidity, strong partnerships, and seamless integrations. By integrations I mean that local stablecoins won't win alone. They need founders to build the apps that'll finally make local stablecoins truly usable (and the liquidity of course).
Take a look at Picnic, a decentralized investment app merging local stablecoins and DeFi, with a rapidly growing user base. That kind of distribution is exactly what local stablecoins need.
Innovation Driven by Necessity
Companies like BlindPay and Capa demonstrate crypto’s unique value by solving problems with solutions so superior to the alternatives that, once businesses learn about them, adoption becomes inevitable.
They prove the thesis that crypto can achieve success through raw innovation that solves real-world pain points.
Just look at their monthly volume charts.
Capa:
BlindPay:
Both look like they're about to send. Hard.
Abstraction as the Final Frontier
Dune ends their report with a line that keeps echoing in my head:
“If the last decade was about proving crypto could work in theory, the next will be about scaling what already works in practice.”
Crypto works now. There's no going around it. It's here to stay. Now comes the hard part, scale.
And the only way we get there is through abstraction.
I'm borrowing this concept from the brilliant minds Manuel Godoy and Santiago Roel Santos. Felix Pago is moving $200M in remittances a month because of abstraction. Inversion, not out yet, has one of the best ideas I've ever heard and is attracting top talent because of abstraction.
Crypto will reach its first billion users once its technology permeates through archaic systems and people don't even know they're using it.
I'd like to end with another huge shoutout to Filipo, the team at Dune, and every contributor who made this report possible. Access to data like this shines a light on what's really happening on the ground, and points us in the right direction.
I'll make sure to put it to good use.
(All data used in this essay was obtained from the The Money Layer: LATAM Crypto 2025 Report)
🌐 Frontier Markets Crypto News
🇧🇷 Brazil
Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies held its first public hearing on Bill 4501/24, proposing a sovereign Bitcoin reserve worth up to $18.6-19B.
Brazil’s Méliuz revealed their 3-step plan: buy 600 BTC, list shares in the US, and evolve into a “Bitcoin bank” offering crypto-based financial services.
Brazil’s central bank has sidelined blockchain tech for its Drex CBDC pilot due to privacy and scalability issues, opting instead for a centralized 2026 launch aimed at enabling credit-backed operations.
🇲🇽 Mexico
Bitso CEO Daniel Vogel met Patrick Witt, Trump’s top crypto advisor, and was invited to expand in the U.S. under a clearer regulatory framework.
🇨🇳 China
China’s State Council may approve yuan-backed stablecoins to boost global yuan use and challenge dollar dominance, with pilots eyed for Hong Kong and Shanghai.