🇲🇽 The Mexican Onchain FX Red Ocean

How onchain FX Is transforming B2B payments

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Frontera EC & Joker
April 18, 2025

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.

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And don't miss this week's guest podcast with Juandi from Capa, where he breaks down how stablecoins and onchain liquidity are powering a new era of FX and cross-border payments.

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🌊 The Mexican Onchain FX Red Ocean

The race to rebuild LatAm’s financial rails is underway, and onchain FX is Max Verstappen.

Across the region businesses are ditching slow, expensive cross-border transfers in favor of stablecoins and blockchain-based settlement. What began as a retail remittance trend is rapidly expanding into B2B flows, unlocking a market worth hundreds of billions.

Let me help you paint the picture: 

  • B2B cross-border payments in the region are projected to reach $1.37 T in the next decade.

  • $163B in remittances flowed into LatAM in 2024, with Mexico alone doing $64.7B.

  • LatAm is the second-fastest growing crypto market in the world with 42.5% YoY growth.

  • Stablecoins already make up 39% of crypto purchases across the region.

  • Bitso became a $2.2B unicorn, and now, many race to stake their claim.

As stablecoins become the default dollar in the region, a new generation of startups is emerging to serve this demand, combining on/off ramps, FX engines, and payment APIs. The market is hot. The competition is fierce. And the winners will define how money moves in LatAm over the next decade.

This article explores the opportunity, the mechanics of onchain FX, and the companies betting big on the future of cross-border payments.

Welcome to the onchain FX red ocean.

⛓️ Institutional FX Flows Go Onchain

Cross-border B2B payments in Latin America are still stuck in a slow, expensive system built for a different era. 

Today, most institutional FX flows depend on a long chain of correspondent banks, SWIFT messages, and intermediaries. For Latin American businesses, that often means 5-10%+ in total costs, involving wire fees, wide FX spreads, and multi-day settlement delays.

Here’s the typical process: pesos → local bank → dollars → correspondent bank → destination. 

Each link adds time, cost, and risk.

Onchain FX flips that script. Companies can convert local fiat into stablecoins, transfer them globally in minutes, and cash out in the target currency, bypassing banking hours and freeing up working capital.

The opportunity is massive:

  • The global FX market sees $7.5T traded daily.

  • MXN has an average daily turnover of $114B.

  • B2B cross-border payments in LatAm are projected to reach $1.37 T in the next decade.

  • Global low-value cross-border B2B payments (<$100K) account for $12T in volume a year.

Even a small migration of institutional flows to blockchain rails could save billions. The market to beat is essentially the entire backbone of cross-border banking, and LatAm’s volatile currencies and expensive corridors make it the perfect testing ground for crypto alternatives.

⚔️ Why Onchain FX Offers an Edge

Onchain FX and stablecoin-based payments offer tangible advantages over traditional methods:

  • Cost Reduction: Moving FX onchain can drastically cut conversion costs by eliminating multiple intermediaries. A Brazilian user swapping BRL to CAD via stablecoins can save 90% vs. bank alternatives. Tight onchain spreads mean businesses get near-interbank rates, not the 3–6% markups.

  • Speed and Always-On Settlement: Blockchain networks operate 24/7 and settle in minutes. A stablecoin sent on Friday night arrives Friday night. No cutoffs and no delays. This real-time flow reduces settlement risk and aligns with the pace of global commerce.

  • Access & Inclusion: No need for Fortune 500 bank partners. Businesses across LatAm can access dollar liquidity via stablecoins, sidestepping informal markets and capital controls. Open access to stablecoin rails levels the playing field. Direct access to on-chain FX markets also boosts transparency and competition in pricing.

  • Liquidity Across Ticket Sizes: Traditional FX is built on a negatively skewed bell curve. It's optimized for large transactions, but not too large, leaving smaller and mid-sized transfers with poor rates. Onchain FX provides liquidity across the full curve.

  • Multi-Currency Flexibility: With stablecoins in USD, EUR, MXN, ARS, BRL and more, companies can hold value in one currency and convert only when needed. An Argentine exporter, for example, can shield earnings in USD and swap to pesos just-in-time for payroll.

  • Programmability and Innovation: Onchain FX enables automated, smart contract-driven workflows: escrowed trades, programmable supply chain payments, and composable financial services.

All of this makes onchain FX not just a better alternative, but a foundation for a new era of faster, cheaper, programmable B2B finance in Latin America.

🔗 The New B2B Value Chain

Moving institutional payments onchain doesn’t remove the need for infrastructure, it just changes who provides it. In the new B2B crypto payments value chain, fintech and crypto-native companies replace roles once dominated by banks.

The stack splits into two core layers:

Onchain FX Liquidity Engines

These are the platforms responsible for creating and maintaining deep, real-time liquidity between currency pairs. They operate as market makers, aggregating liquidity from exchanges, OTC desks, and DEXs to offer institutional-grade execution. Their job is to ensure that when someone wants to move money onchain from one currency to another, there’s a competitive price and enough liquidity to make it happen. They don’t handle end users, they build the FX infrastructure underneath.

B2B Payment Platforms

These companies sit on top of the liquidity layer and make it usable for businesses. They source stablecoin liquidity, handle KYC and compliance, abstract away wallet and custody complexity, and interface with local banking systems to deliver or receive fiat. Think of them as the middleware that connects corporate clients to the onchain world. Their job is to make stablecoin-based cross-border payments feel as simple and seamless as any other service.

Together, these two layers compress the traditional FX value chain. No more correspondent banks, no more multi-day delays. Just a direct path from fiat → stablecoin → FX conversion → settlement. 

🤾 The Players: Who's Competing Where?

The race to rewire cross-border payments is officially on, and the track runs straight through Latin America. Dozens of startups are sprinting to capture market share. The competition runs deep. Some are building liquidity. Others are mastering last-mile delivery. A few are betting on stablecoins issuance. And even less do all.

To understand who’s doing what and how the stack is evolving, we mapped out the entire Latin American onchain FX landscape:

This is more than a race to move money faster.

It’s a race to redesign how value flows: who gets paid, when, and on what terms. In Latin America, stablecoins are no longer just a curiosity. They are the infrastructure. The companies mastering onchain FX today aren’t just winning market share. They are laying the financial rails for a region that has long been underserved by traditional institutions.

In the red ocean of cross-border payments, speed alone isn’t enough. Liquidity, compliance, and trust will define the winners.

📰 LatAm Crypto News 📰

🇧🇷 Brazil

Brazil’s oil giant Petrobras is exploring Bitcoin mining and asset tokenization to modernize operations and diversify revenue using excess energy. 

Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice allows judges to seize crypto assets from debtors to repay creditors, treating them like traditional assets.  

🇦🇷 Argentina

Argentina’s CNV is building a regulatory framework for tokenized investments, aiming to modernize capital markets with blockchain-based transparency and security.

🇲🇽 Mexico

Bitso introduces Euro Ramps, enabling businesses to send and receive stablecoin payments between Europe and Latin America. 

10% of remittances to Mexico, India, and Nigeria now use stablecoins. Crypto rails are rising as the new cross-border standard, with early traction in PH, PK, and Egypt.