🇧🇷 Predicting Paradigm’s $13.5M Investment Into Stablecoin Startup Crown

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Don't miss this week's podcast where we analyze everything that happened in this crazy, crazy week.

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🔮 Predicting the Future at Frontera

It's that time of the year again. Funding rounds, acquisitions, mergers, and strategic bets are all heating up again, fast. 

After months of relative calm, this week felt electric. Like I got hit by a truck. I don't remember writing about a similar one in ages.

And the craziest part is, none of it caught us off guard.

Not because they were prophets, were not, I think, but because the trends behind these deals are the same ones we've been writing about for months. We predicted everything right to the dot! Well not literally but almost quite. Bear with me.

If you're an avid Frontera fan you know we've been covering opportunities in LatAm, local stablecoin growth and fragmentation, and fintechs shifting to crypto rails.

Three themes which line up perfectly with three of the biggest investment stories in Latin America this week. So let's break down what happened and how it connects back to the tectonic changes we’ve been tracking. 

🇦🇷 Nexo Acquires Buenbit

Nexo, the global digital-asset platform with $11B AUM, has acquired Buenbit, one of Argentina and Peru’s most trusted crypto platforms and a CNV-registered VASP. With the deal, Nexo establishes Buenos Aires as its LatAm hub, anchoring a multi-year expansion across Argentina, Peru, and Mexico.

Nexo made the deal because when looking to expand, global liquidity and advanced products become far more powerful when paired with a team that truly understands local users, local regulation, and local distribution.

Buenbit has been a very important entry point into crypto in Argentina, built on strong compliance, simple user experience, and fiat-to-crypto rails shaped by years of inflation and volatility. Now its users gain access to Nexo’s full product suite, from high-yield savings and crypto-backed loans to more than one hundred assets, fifteen hundred trading pairs, structured products, futures trading, and more.

And yes, we called this months ago.

Back in our essay Crypto M&A Is Back, we outlined why local wallets across LatAm were one of the most obvious acquisition targets for global platforms looking to enter the region. Fragmented markets, country-specific user behavior, and wildly different financial structures make local expertise an extremely valuable asset. 

Buying a local wallet means acquiring loyal users and an experienced team that already understands the terrain, instead diving headfirst into untapped markets and burning cash on marketing campaigns destined to fail.

Nexo acquiring Buenbit is that thesis materializing in real time. And it certainly won’t be the last.

🇧🇷 Paradigm Backs Crown in Its First Brazil Investment

Paradigm has made its first-ever investment in Brazil, leading a $13.5M Series A into Crown, the issuer of BRLV, a real-denominated stablecoin backed by Brazilian government bonds. Crown says BRLV is now the largest emerging-market stablecoin, with R$360M+ (~$66M) in subscriptions, driven almost entirely by institutional demand.

This is huge to a local stablecoin bull like myself.

Paradigm made this bet because Brazil is one of the world’s most active digital-asset markets, and BRL-linked stablecoins unlock a yield profile that USD stablecoins cannot match. Crown’s architecture taps directly into Brazil’s 15%+ base rate, giving institutions a real-denominated stablecoin that earns native yield while remaining wrapped in compliant, institutional-grade infrastructure.

And how did we predict this?

In our essay Our Read on Dune’s The Money Layer, we wrote about the fragmentation of Brazil’s stablecoin landscape and argued that the winner would be the issuer that mastered distribution and partnerships.

Crown leaned into exactly that by focusing on institutions rather than fighting for retail mindshare, turning adoption into a sales cycle rather than a marketing battle. 

Their B2B approach works because, when you walk into a Brazilian company, crypto or not, and offer 15% on their AUM, you get their attention immediately. Yes, I know the mechanics are more complex than that, but it's still part of how Circle and Tether make their money. Crown simply applied it to a local market where the interest-rate spread makes the value proposition irresistible. 

And this is exactly the kind of distribution advantage we predicted would separate the eventual winners in Brazil’s fragmented stablecoin landscape.

We're in kind of a heater right now.

🌎 Tala Partners with Huma Finance

Tala, one of the world’s largest underbanked lenders with nearly 13M customers, has partnered with Huma Finance to launch the first tokenized lending platform for emerging markets. 

The company is deploying a $50M credit facility in USDC on Solana to deliver instant, AI-underwritten, permissionless loans to borrowers who have never had access to traditional credit rails.

Tala brings a decade of lending data, $7B in performance history across multiple continents, while Huma provides the onchain payments and liquidity infrastructure that makes these loans transferable, transparent, and fundable by global capital from day one.

“Was this another of your predictions?”

Yes. Yes it was. This is exactly what the transition from Fintech 2.0 to Fintech 3.0 looks like. A global institution moving core operations (disbursement, repayment, risk, liquidity, or whatever) onto blockchain rails because they’re faster, cheaper, more transparent, and instantly global.

And that shift to Fintech 3.0 is what I've been researching and writing about every day for the past few months. In fact, I've never been more locked in than this in my life. Everyone knows my name at the locked in factory.

All of that work is now coming together in our upcoming report, Fintech 3.0: The Great Platform Shift in Mexico, which goes live next week.

And it'll be our greatest work yet. You won't want to miss it. 

Register here to receive the report once it goes live, and for you to see our predictions before they happen.

💰 More Aquisitons

💳 Stripe brings Valora team onboard to scale stablecoin payments

Stripe has acqui-hired the team behind Valora, a Celo-based crypto payments app, adding wallet and onchain tooling expertise as it doubles down on stablecoins, crypto rails, and blockchain-native payments.

🇮🇩 Robinhood enters Indonesia

Robinhood will enter Indonesia by acquiring a local brokerage and a licensed crypto trader, targeting a market with 19M equity investors and 17M crypto users. 

🌎 LatAm

🌎 Aave on powering LatAm’s stablecoin revolution

Aave published a deep dive on how DeFi is unlocking yield and credit for stablecoin users in Latin America, helping fintechs turn idle dollars into productive capital across the region’s fastest-growing crypto markets.

🇲🇽 Mexico

🇲🇽 Mexico unlocks $409B for private markets

Mexico’s pension funds ($409B AUM) can now invest up to 30% in alternative assets, including venture capital. For the first time, long-term local capital can back startups, fintech, and digital infrastructure, with assets set to reach $650B by 2030.