- Frontera by Espacio Cripto
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- 🌎 The Inversion Playbook
Real problems. Real solutions. Real data. This is Frontera.
Your weekly dose of data-driven crypto insights from the Latin American frontier. From Buenos Aires to Monterrey, we cover it all: the numbers, the projects, the people.
If you’re building, investing, or scaling in LatAm, this is where you start.
Reading this by email? Click Read Online in the top right corner to view the full edition. Or listen to the full episode here.
And don't miss this week's guest podcast with Santiago Roel from Inversion, where he breaks down how he plans to bring the world’s GDP onchain.
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🌎 How to Onboard a Billion Users into Crypto?
Crypto won't reach a billion users through speculation. They won't walk through the doors of the casino. They won't be staring at charts for hours. They won't pay for groceries with the hottest L3.
They'll get there through need, without even knowing.
Phones that work. Remittances that arrive in seconds. Savings that grow. Crypto will scale by disappearing into the background.
That's the thesis behind Santiago Roel’s Inversion, a venture built to acquire real-world businesses with high-frequency users and embed crypto into the core infrastructure they already rely on.
It all starts in Mexico, where the demand is real and the distribution is already in place:
This is the Inversion playbook: onboard through acquisitions, scale through necessity, retain through utility, and repeat.
In this report, we break down why this model makes sense, and how Inversion plans to bring GDP onchain.
🟢 What is Inversion?
Inversion is best described as a crypto-infused private equity play.
Founded by Santiago Roel Santos, it operates like a holding company that buys traditional businesses, supercharges them with blockchain infrastructure to cut costs and unlock new services, and holds them forever.
The goal isn't to just build another app or chain. It's to absorb real economic activity and bring GDP onchain. That starts by fixing crypto's broken onboarding funnel.
Getting into crypto usually means logging into an exchange and buying tokens, an experience built on speculation that turns off mainstream consumers. You can't sell a conservative product through a casino. Most people don't want to gamble, they just want better services.
Santiago’s thesis inverts the script. It meets users where they already are, with products they already need. In his words, it's “crypto-enabled”, not crypto-first. Instead of building an app from scratch and hoping users show up, Inversion buys the user base first, and then layers in the crypto rails.
The grand challenge is to make crypto invisible yet useful, embedding blockchain-based features so seamlessly that users never realize, or even think about, what is under the hood. That journey begins with Inversion's first acquisition: a Mexican MVNO.
🇲🇽 Why Start in LatAm? Why Mexico?
It's simple. Latin America is a fertile ground for crypto adoption. The region hosts over 667M people, with a perfect storm of conditions driving PMF: economic instability, high inflation, and massive remittance flows.
In 2024, LatAm was the second-fastest growing crypto market globally, with a 42.5% YoY increase. Here, growth is fueled by need. From Argentina's inflation-stricken economy, to Brazil's businesses, to Mexico's remittances, stablecoins have found real demand. They represent 39% of crypto volume in the region. For many, they're not a choice… they're survival.
Within LatAm, Inversion chose Mexico as its beachhead for several reasons: