🎆 Welcome to the Big ’26

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.

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🎆 New Year, New Me

Happy New Year, and welcome to the big ’26.

Big Year. Big expectations. Big goals.

Thank you, again, for sticking with us and for reading Frontera every week. You are what lets this project exist.

In hindsight, 2025 was a defining year for crypto. 

Regulation finally caught up to reality, especially in the U.S., where the long-awaited stablecoin frameworks unlocked a new wave of institutional and consumer adoption. Stablecoins ran wild, crypto-enabled apps quietly pushed into the mainstream, and onchain rails started looking like real financial infrastructure.

Price-wise, it was an okay year, and definitely not an easy one. New all-time highs were broken, but the uphill battle, and downhill tumble, was quite messy. Most people trading perps probably lost everything due to the long stretches of endless chop and violent fakeouts, and how could we forget the infamous 10/10 liquidation cascade. The market also got a lot stricter. Recycled VC slopcoins stopped getting the attention they never deserved and empty narratives died a lot quickly. Which is, good?

And this sets the stage for what comes next, for the big ’26. 

We expect to see stablecoin/crypto regulation in emerging markets as countries follow the United States’s lead. This will especially be more pronounced in Mexico as they are included in the Mexico-U.S. free trade agreement negotiations.

We expect to see blockchain rails completely take over the payments industry.

We expect to see a lot more local stablecoins.

I can feel it'll be a good year.

🔮 Our Frontera Predictions

Before we jump into predictions, one important clarification: these aren’t short-term market calls or price targets for the next 12 months.

These are five long-term predictions pulled directly from our Fintech 3.0: The Great Platform Shift in Mexico report, looking five years out, not a few months. 

They reflect how we believe financial infrastructure will evolve as stablecoins, blockchains, and regulation converge, especially in Mexico.

We’re including them here because 2025 felt like the setup year. Everyone and their mom realized stablecoins are the future. In 2026, we will see companies act upon that shift as they set out to win.

If you haven’t read the report yet, this is your cue to do it. Download your copy here.

And if you have, consider this a reminder of where we think the world is actually headed, as these themes will be extremely relevant this year.

Here are our five Frontera predictions:

1. Stock and crypto investing will become commodity features for every neobank.

The era of separate banking and trading apps will end as users grow accustomed to managing deposits, crypto, and U.S. equities in one place. Following the path already set by Bitso and DolarApp, every digital bank will adopt integrated investing as a baseline expectation. The competitive edge will no longer be whether a fintech offers stocks and crypto, but how seamlessly these capabilities are delivered within a unified financial experience.

2. Over 70% of U.S.-Mexico remittances will move through stablecoins.

Stablecoins will become the dominant rail for the $64.7B U.S.-Mexico remittance corridor as senders and receivers shift toward faster, cheaper, always-on transfers. Bitso already handles more than 10% of the corridor, demonstrating both demand and scale. Traditional players are beginning to adapt as well, highlighted by Western Union launching its USDPT stablecoin on Solana to modernize its payout infrastructure. As stablecoin rails integrate into mainstream apps, families will receive transfers in seconds instead of days and remittance fees that often reach 6% today will fall sharply. Within a few years, most remittances into Mexico will move over blockchain rails even if users never realize they are interacting with crypto.

3. Mexico’s largest betting company will run on prediction market infrastructure.

Prediction markets will power the back-end engine of a major betting operator in Mexico, handling odds, liquidity, and payouts through transparent onchain mechanisms. As decentralized prediction protocols mature, their liquidity and accuracy will make them attractive not only to sportsbooks seeking efficient and trustless settlement, but also to users who benefit from fairer, market-driven odds. Bettors may never realize that smart contracts sit underneath the interface, yet the core mechanics of the country’s biggest betting platform will soon be running on them.

4. MXN-backed stablecoins will grow 300x as domestic adoption accelerates.

The entire MXN stablecoin market is only about $3M today, represented mainly by Bitso’s MXNB, Tether’s MXNT, and Etherfuse’s MXNe, none of which even appear on crypto analytics platforms such as DeFiLlama or Artemis. As fintechs begin using digital pesos for settlement, liquidity movement, treasury management, merchant flows, and onchain FX, demand will scale rapidly. What is now an invisible corner of the market will evolve into a foundational layer of Mexico’s financial infrastructure, pushing MXN stablecoins toward a 300x increase over the next five years.

5. Half of Mexican fintechs will operate on Fintech 3.0 rails.

Today, roughly 10% of Mexican fintechs use crypto infrastructure in some capacity, but as the use cases outlined in this report mature, the shift toward Fintech 3.0 rails will accelerate. Within the next five years, at least 50% of local fintechs will either build these capabilities natively or integrate them through specialized infrastructure partners that abstract regulatory and technical complexity. This transition will fundamentally reshape competition in the market, as Fintech 3.0-enabled products begin to outperform legacy offerings, forcing even the largest incumbents, including Nubank, to adapt or risk losing relevance.