🇲🇽 Our Takeaways from Bitso’s Stablecoin Conference

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.

Reading this by email? Click Read Online in the top right corner to view the full edition.

And don't miss this week's podcast where we discuss the Stablecoin Conference in depth and the potential US invasion in Venezuela.

🌎 Welcome to Frontera

To those who joined us at the VIP Dinner and Afterparty, welcome to Frontera.

We're glad you're here.

Frontera is where the intersection of frontier markets and crypto gets documented, decoded, and debated. Every week, we cover the most important trends, technologies, and builders shaping the financial future of the global majority.

If you’re new, here are some of my favorite essays to get started:

• Stablecoins and the American Techno-economic Conquest of the 21st Century

• Schrödinger's All-Time High

• The Stablecoin Sandwich

• The Local Stablecoin Thesis

Now, let’s talk about the conference.

To me, Bitso’s Stablecoin Conference marked a convergence of worlds: where regulation met innovation, where institutional finance met grassroots builders, and where everyone else met crypto's clearest use case yet…

Stablecoins.

What follows are the key takeaways, drawn from panels, hallway conversations, and firsthand observations, that defined the event and hint at the evolution of stablecoins beyond 2025.

📺 Tech Aways Finds a Way

Every great civilization has been defined by the tools it invents, and the problems those tools solve. 

From the wheel to the steam engine, from the printing press to the GPU chip, technology bends to necessity. And when the need is urgent enough, it spreads like wildfire.

Back in 1886, no one thought cars would replace horses, well, maybe only the Michelin brothers. 

Horses were familiar, loyal, alive. But cars were faster, more efficient, and easier to scale. So after a while, the world adapted because it had too. The technology was simply far too good.

The same story is playing out today with stablecoins and legacy financial infrastructure.

In just eight years they've grown from a niche idea to a $280B+ asset class that moves trillions in value every month. Why you may ask? They fulfill needs that traditional rails no longer can.

Seeing suits, bankers, and regulators (more on this below) at the Stablecoin Conference scrambling to understand what’s already happening was all the confirmation I needed. Finance is coming onchain.

Because when the tech works better, the world adapts. It always does.

🧩 Abstraction is the Endgame

Im gonna directly quote what Santiago Roel said at the conference to start this one off:

“If crypto is so wonderful, why don’t we have more users? If BTC hits $50K again and SOL retraces back to shitcoin land, how will we justify being here?”

And he's right. Santi received a standing ovation for it. Why don't we have more users?

The thing is, the crypto industry was built on speculation. Spot, perps, longs, shorts, NFTs, memecoins, prediction markets, launchpads. Most of the stuff we see here relies on the numbers going up. 

It hinders adoption. But now, as I said above, tech has found a way. And when it does, it becomes invisible.

Think about the tech people use daily for a moment. 

You don't marvel at TCP/IP when sending an email. You don’t wonder about transformer architecture when prompting ChatGPT. You don’t analyze GPS trilateration when ordering an Uber.

Crypto should be the same. It should be abstracted for the user.

That's the end goal. That’s the final piece of the puzzle. That's. How. We. Scale.

Abstraction is the answer to the how to onboard a billion users question.

🏟️ Welcome to the Big Leagues

At the conference, if you needed any kind of evidence of how far we as an industry have come, you only had to look around the room.

Moderating the “Unlocking Opportunity in Emerging Markets” panel, Ab asked the audience to raise their hands if they recognized the name “Vitalik”.

Only around 30% did. Excluding one of the panelists!

Just a few years ago that question would've been absurd. You'd get kicked out for not worshiping, let alone not knowing Vitalik.

Ab even said in this week's episode that in most crypto conferences people skip the panels altogether. They just want to go grab a few beers at the side events.

But not this time. The room was jam packed. The suits were sent to study and take notes. They finally care (because they have to) and want to adopt crypto.

The audience has changed. Crypto's center of gravity is shifting. 

Welcome to the big leagues boys.

🪖 Bitso is Winning the Two-Front War

No one left the conference wondering who the main character was. Well, they kinda organized it and all, but still.

Bitso has more than a decade building products, relationships, and credibility. You could feel it in the room. It was their turf.

Bitso is winning the two-front war in LatAm.

On one side, retail: over 9M users speculating on crypto and buying stablecoins to escape inflation, send remittances, or preserve their savings.

On the other, institutions: nearly 2,000 businesses relying on Bitso Business (Bitso’s institutional arm which just got a sick rebranding btw) to move over $12B a year in cross-border payments, trusting them to abstract away the headaches (regulation, banking integrations, deep liquidity, local currency conversions).

Both sides turbocharged by never-ending innovation: Juno, their new stablecoin issuer, is laying the groundwork for local stablecoins like MXNB and BRL1. The Push, their startup accelerator, is shaping the next generation of stablecoin-native companies.

Bitso owns the stablecoin narrative in Mexico, and dare I say, LatAm.

Traditional players understand them, and regulators trust them. That's as clear a moat as it gets.

👨‍🚀 Espacio Cripto is Top Player in the Region

While Bitso dominated the institutional narrative, the conference also underscored the pivotal role of Espacio Cripto in Latin America’s crypto culture.

If Bitso is the infrastructure, Espacio Cripto is the community.

Many of the event’s most engaging panels featured familiar faces from Frontera and the Espacio Cripto podcast:

Ab, Cush, Santiago Roel, Raj, Dave, Ben, Will, Juandi, Aaron, Manu, Zach…

I could go on, but you get the idea (after 400+ episodes you kind of lose track). 

Our influence extended beyond the daytime panels.

The official closing party (aptly named Superconductor) powered by Bridge and Privy, was co-hosted by Espacio Cripto. The afterparty was a who’s-who of the LatAm crypto scene, and it was EC’s community roots that turned it into a reunion of friends. 

Likewise, a VIP dinner for top top top speakers and sponsors was arranged leveraging EC’s network, showing the trust we’ve built among industry leaders.

And beyond the nightlife too.

Try searching for content about the event. About the builders. About what it felt like to be there.

Not just about this conference, but basically any crypto event.

It doesn't exist. No one else documents the culture like we do. We make it immortal.

This takeaway is quite clear: any company or project that wants to succeed in LatAm will benefit from tapping into Espacio Cripto’s audience and ethos.

We might just be the distribution layer you need.

🇧🇷 Brasil

🇧🇷 Itaú launches crypto investment unit

Brazil’s biggest private bank, Itaú, just launched a dedicated crypto investment unit to design Bitcoin and digital asset funds. 

🇲🇽 Mexico

🇲🇽 Binance launches Medá with $53M investment

Binance unveiled Medá, a licensed Electronic Payment Funds Institution (IFPE) in Mexico for peso deposits and withdrawals, backed by a $53M investment over four years.

🇲🇽 Mexico’s first Bitcoin treasury

Mexico’s first Bitcoin-native company, now reimagined as the country’s first Bitcoin Treasury, plans listing on the BMV with key tax advantages.

🇧🇴 Bolivia

🇧🇴 Bolivia to launch digital boliviano this month

Bolivia’s central bank will debut the “Boliviano Digital” CBDC in late September to modernize payments amid cash decline and rising crypto use.

📊 Analytics

⛓️ Chainalysis 2025 Adoption Index

Chainalysis releases the preview for their 6th annual Global Adoption Index report, revealing which countries lead grassroots crypto adoption and highlighting real-world use cases driving growth.