Welcome to the Money Code Episode Brief, where we distill each Money Code episode into the key ideas and implications that matter.

In this week’s conversation, Bitso CEO Daniel Vogel joins us to explain how a company founded to fix cross-border payments evolved from early Bitcoin experiments into infrastructure now handling 10% of all US-to-Mexico remittances and more than $80B in annualized payment volume across Latin America.

Listen to the full episode on Apple, Spotify, Youtube, or on your favorite platform. Don’t forget to follow Money Code on X (@moneycodepod) and LinkedIn. 

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Episode Brief: How Stablecoins Scaled Cross-Border Payments to $80B w/ Daniel Vogel (Bitso)

Why this episode matters

A lot of “stablecoin adoption” talk is still framed around consumer wallets and speculation. Bitso’s story is the opposite: stablecoins became economically inevitable once you operate inside real cross-border constraints like weekend settlement gaps, prefunding burdens, fragmented liquidity, and inconsistent regulatory timelines.

Vogel’s underlying claim is that stablecoins win when they behave like better settlement infrastructure. Not because they’re “crypto,” but because they remove working-capital drag and compress time-to-money for payment businesses that are structurally underserved by correspondent banking.

The core ideas

• Bitso’s B2B payment rails are the real scaling story, not remittances. $80B annualized TPV is mostly enterprise flows; remittances are meaningful but not the bulk.
• Stablecoins unlock cross-border primarily by reducing prefunding and weekend risk, not by lowering fees alone. 24/7 settlement lets remitters and PSPs keep less idle capital parked with payout partners.
• You don’t get “pure stablecoin business models” early. The retail brokerage business funded the long R&D cycle until stablecoins hit critical mass in liquidity, tooling, and acceptance.
• Financial innovation happens in uneven timelines. Liquidity, regulation, and tech mature at different speeds, so scaling requires operating in “gray zones” while staying aligned with the spirit of compliance.
• Local-currency stablecoins are about onchain financial products and local pricing, not Americans holding MXN. The bet is MXN- and BRL-denominated credit, settlement, and DeFi primitives that match how people earn, borrow, and repay.
• The industry is recreating fragmentation risk. Chain proliferation is diluting liquidity and raising complexity, which directly fights the goal of efficient FX and settlement.

What this changes

• For PSPs and remitters: stablecoins are a working-capital and operational advantage. If you can settle continuously, you can outcompete peers still trapped in batch banking cycles.
• For banks and local rails: even “good” domestic payment systems can be hard to innovate on because participation is slow, costly, and centralized. Stablecoin rails invite faster product experimentation.
• For builders: the durable wedge is infrastructure that connects local banking rails to global crypto rails via APIs, with liquidity + payout coverage, not another consumer wallet.

What we didn’t fully resolve

• How the MXN/BRL liquidity flywheel actually starts on-chain without subsidizing idle liquidity indefinitely.
• What “regulatory clarity” needs to look like in Mexico (and similar markets) for stablecoin treatment, especially tax, to unlock the next step-function in adoption.
• Whether interoperability solutions can outrun chain fragmentation fast enough to keep cross-chain FX usable at scale.

If you listen, listen for this

The episode’s thesis is that stablecoins scale when they eliminate the operational physics of cross-border money: settlement windows, prefunding, and banking latency. Once you see stablecoins as “continuous settlement with programmable liquidity,” Bitso’s $80B run-rate stops sounding like a crypto anecdote and starts sounding like payments infrastructure catching up to the internet.