- Frontera by Espacio Cripto
- Posts
- 🌎 Why You Should Be Bullish On LatAm
🌎 Why You Should Be Bullish On LatAm
The world’s financial battleground
Frontera EC & Joker
May 02, 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.
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 Ben from Mantle, where we dive into why he’s betting big on LatAm and how crypto becomes infrastructure when there’s no Plan B.
This Edition is Presented by Bando
🚀 Unlock seamless Web3 spending with Bando: The Onchain Spending Protocol!
Easily integrate our customizable widget in minutes to enable your dApp, Wallet, or AI Agent to let users spend tokens on gaming, retail, travel and more.
Ready to revolutionize your platform?
🌎 Why You Should Be Bullish on LatAm
Latin America isn’t crypto’s next frontier, it’s already the battleground where digital assets meet real economic needs.
From remittances to inflation hedging, adoption here is driven by sheer necessity, not hype. Crypto is used to move money, store value, and access the financial services that traditional systems fail to provide today.
Here’s overview of what’s happening on the ground:
Mexico processes $64.7B in remittances, with 10% already flowing through Bitso via stablecoins.
Argentina faces 100%+ inflation, yet 60% of crypto volume is in stablecoins.
Brazil is LatAm’s largest economy and more citizens hold crypto than stocks.
Venezuela turned to crypto after hyperinflation hit 1,000,000%.
This is what real adoption looks like. No region tests crypto under higher pressure, or proves its value more clearly, than Latin America.
In this report, we map out the strongest signs of real-world traction across LatAm's key markets.
Bullish on crypto? You're already bullish on Latin America.
🇲🇽 Mexico: Where Everything Goes Onchain
In Mexico, the problem isn’t theoretical, it's logistical. The country sits at the center of the world's largest remittance corridor, with millions relying on money sent home to cover basic expenses.
But traditional rails are broken.
As a workaround for their problems, the country has gone onchain. Bitso now handles over 10% of U.S.-Mexico remittances via stablecoins, slashing costs and settling in seconds. For families, this means more pesos on the table, instantly.
And it doesn't stop at remittances. Businesses are also abandoning slow and expensive cross-border transfers in favor of blockchain-based settlement. New players like Capa, Nonco, and Rio are building onchain FX stacks that offer instant conversions and global transfers between pesos and dollars at a fraction of traditional costs.
Even the peso is going onchain. Bitso recently launched MXNB on Arbitrum. Etherfuse’s MXNe backed by Mexican government bonds, brings real yield to digital pesos, and already sees millions in volume across Solana, Base, and Stellar.
The demand for onchain liquidity, pesos, dollars, you name it, and crypto-enabled products is real. Mexico is ground zero for a new era of financial infrastructure in Latin America.
🇦🇷 Argentina: Stablecoins or Nothing
In Argentina, the enemy isn't hidden: it's the peso. Triple-digit inflation has hollowed out the country's financial infrastructure, forcing citizens to seek refuge outside of banks and beyond borders.
The system no longer works:
Inflation was at an average of 237% in 2024.
The Argentine peso lost over 90% of its value in the past five years.
Bank accounts offer negative yield.
So people adapted. Stablecoins became the default dollar savings account.
On Bitso, over 72% of Argentine crypto purchases are USDT or USDC. A well-known pattern has emerged: workers convert salaries into stablecoins the moment they land, a dollarization strategy to escape peso devaluation. This isn’t speculative behavior; it’s a rational response to an untenable monetary situation, and it’s driving some of the highest stablecoin usage rates in the world.
The same conditions that drive users to crypto also motivate a generation of builders to craft tools for survival. This has turned the crypto scene into a testing ground where economic urgency meets technical innovation. From the rise of stablecoin-first apps like Lemon to the expansion of Decentraland, POAP, OpenZeppelin, and QuarkID, Argentina punches well above its weight in global crypto talent.
Grassroots communities like Crecimiento and Seed Latam are amplifying that momentum, fueling the kind of local builder culture that powers long-term ecosystems.
It's no coincidence Devconnect is heading to Buenos Aires this November 17-22, where crypto’s future is already being built.
🇧🇷 Brazil: Scale Meets Speculation
Brazil is more than just massive, it's structurally primed for crypto at scale.
This isn’t a market driven by desperation, it’s one powered by distribution.With deep financial infrastructure, high digital penetration, and a population used to economic volatility, Brazil has been overrun by crypto.
It ranks in the top 10 for global crypto adoption. Nubank onboarded 1M users in just 30 days when they enabled crypto trading in 2022. And today, more Brazilians invest in digital assets than in traditional stocks.
While necessity may drive adoption elsewhere, in Brazil, it's the thrill. You wont find a country more degen.
They beat the U.S. to market with the world's first spot XRP ETF. Itaú, Brazil's largest private bank, lets users buy crypto directly from their app. This is like if Chase let their customers buy Solana on demand. Between late 2023 and early 2024, the volume of $1M+ crypto transactions jumped over 90%, as institutions joined retail traders in chasing yield, access, and liquidity.
If Argentina is crypto for survival, Brazil is crypto at scale. Mature rails, hungry investors, and a culture built on experimentation, it’s everything the next phase of adoption needs.
🇻🇪 Venezuela: Crypto as Economic Lifeline
No country has tested crypto’s utility like Venezuela. It's the ultimate case study of crypto-as-necessity. Decades of mismanagement and collapse have gutted the economy, leaving citizens to rebuild their financial lives with whatever tools they can find.
Annual inflation once hit 1,000,000%.
I think we don't even need more bullet points. This is it. The endgame boss. The bolívar lost nearly all practical value. Banks couldn't be trusted, and neither could the state.
So people turned to crypto. Not to speculate, but to survive.
Venezuela now consistently ranks among the highest globally in grassroots crypto adoption, and in 2024 led LatAm with a YoY onchain volume growth of over 110%.
That demand built a new kind of infrastructure from the ground up. Peer-to-peer platforms like El Dorado became lifelines, offering digital dollars through direct swaps in a country where cash is scarce and financial access is fractured.
In Venezuela, what emerged is a glimpse of what adoption looks like when there is no Plan B, only crypto.
🌐 Advancing the Frontier
Across the region, crypto is not just an investment thesis or a technological experiment. It’s infrastructure. It’s resilience. It’s a way to send money home, protect savings, move value across borders, and access financial systems that were never designed to include everyone.
We're advancing the frontier.
Mexico is turning remittances into stablecoin rails. Argentina has dollarized from the bottom up. Brazil’s fintechs are onboarding millions to digital assets as naturally as they offer checking accounts. Venezuela built a parallel financial system out of code when the old one collapsed.
And beyond them: El Salvador, Chile, Colombia, and Peru are each showing, in their own way, that crypto is a necessity.
The takeaway is simple: You can't make sense of where crypto is going without understanding what's already happening in Latin America.
The user base is here. The use-cases are proven. And the dollars (and pesos, reals, and bolívars) are flowing onchain. Those who still think of crypto in LatAm as a speculative sideshow are missing the plot. The global south is setting the benchmark for real-world adoption, and it’s doing so at a pace that should turn heads. The momentum in Latin America shows that crypto’s future isn’t just Silicon Valley apps or Wall Street ETFs. It’s solving real problems for real people.
And that is why you should be bullish on LatAm. This is where crypto’s true potential is being realized today, and Frontera is documenting this transformation every step of the way.
📰 LatAm Crypto News 📰
🗺️ LatAm
Visa and Stripe’s Bridge just launched a stablecoin card issuing product. Developers can now issue Visa cards linked to USDC balances across Argentina, Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Chile.
At checkout, stablecoins are converted to fiat instantly, making crypto spendable anywhere Visa is accepted. If the essay didn't make you bullish enough on LatAm, this just did.
🇧🇷 Brazil
Hashdex has listed the world's first spot XRP ETF on Brazil’s B3. The fund offers easy access to XRP without direct purchase, beating the U.S. to market.
André Zommerfelds mapped Brazil's 50+ most important crypto players, showing how local firms are going head-to-head with global giants.
Brazil’s largest bank Itaú now lets users trade Solana, USDC, and XRP directly through its app, expanding its crypto offering beyond BTC and ETH.
🇲🇽 Mexico
Bitso quietly discontinued its crypto debit card, launched in Nov 2022. Despite early traction, tough unit economics and strategic misalignment led to its shutdown.