🌎 The Stablecoin Sandwich

Real problems. Real solutions. Real data. This is Frontera.

Your weekly dose of data-driven crypto insights from the Latin American frontier. 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 LatAm.

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And don't miss this week's guest podcast with Ben Reid, Head of Stablecoins at Bitso, where he walks us through their stablecoin thesis and the new Juno platform.

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.

🥪 Stablecoin Sandwiches

Most stablecoin flows today still follow the same old pattern: fiat → USD stablecoin → fiat. A plain old process. It's functional, but disconnected from local realities.

A better model is unfolding: fiat → local stablecoin → local stablecoin → fiat. A leaner, local-first design that finally speaks the language of emerging economies.

Today, I'll walk you through the concept, and break down why it could change how money moves forever.

👨🏻‍🍳 The Old Stablecoin Flow

For years, the go-to recipe for moving value on crypto rails has been simple: take your local currency, convert it to a dollar-pegged stablecoin, and later convert that back to another local currency if needed.

Fiat → USD stablecoin → fiat has been the trusty path filling global crypto appetite. It gets the job done, but at what cost?

Whether you’re sending pesos, reales, or whatever currency, the recipe stays the same: everything gets funneled through dollars. That's fine if you need USD on the other end. But if what you’re after is local cash, the route stops making sense.

Each hop in that flow adds hidden fees and inefficiencies. You effectively pay for two currency conversions, into USD on the way in and out of USD on the way out, plus the overhead of moving through an extra intermediary.

It was never designed for local relevance. The result is a bloated system, held together by habit more than need.

Now, it's time to cook up something better. 

I hope you're hungry.

🍔 The Stablecoin Sandwich

The Stablecoin Sandwich model swaps the old, single-USD filling for two slices of fresh, local stablecoins. Ben Reid, Head of Stablecoins at Bitso, in his amazing essay, likens the shift to a sundae, but I'll stick with the sandwich, a simple, savory snack that encompasses the whole flow. 

In practice, it looks like this: fiat → local stablecoin →  local stablecoin → fiat. 

Mexican pesos are tokenized into an MXN-backed stablecoin, swapped directly onchain for, say, a COP-pegged stablecoin, and then redeemed for Colombian pesos on the other side. 

The magic is in the middle, in the local stablecoin-to-stablecoin conversion.

It's what we call onchain FX, and it changes everything.