Abraham Cobos

People can now send a traditional wire transfer in Mexico and receive assets on Base in a couple of minutes. Before Bando this process took more than 15 minutes and used at least 2 crypto products like exchanges, bridges, crypto wallets and more. We abstract all of that complexity and Bando is the first-ever direct connection between Base and the Mexican traditional banking system 😱 😳. Mexico is one of the countries with the lowest crypto adoption rates in LATAM (MX +- 6%, Col +-8%, Bra +-15%, Arg +-25%). We believe this is due to the difficulties in accessing crypto easily, quickly, and safely. Bando enables users to send Mexican pesos through a local wire transfer (instant settlement between fiat banks) and receive ETH, USDC, and other assets on Base. Users select the amount they want to send, choose their desired asset, provide their Base address, make the local wire transfer, and receive their assets in less than 4 minutes. We abstract all crypto complexity for the user; they don’t see any bridges, DEXs, order books, or any on-chain signing. We're leveraging Espacio Cripto's (https://www.espaciocripto.io/) community to drive adoption. EC is the largest crypto community in Mexico and one of the largest crypto podcasts in LATAM (over 300 episodes). Ab and Lalo started it in 2020 to help Spanish-speaking people have access to top-quality content to learn about crypto, and we've partnered in the past with organizations like The Ethereum Foundation, Optimism, and more. We're implementing the community learnings we've gained to drive engagement, have a positive impact, and maintain tight feedback loops. https This is the first step in our plan to build a global crypto broker for the Global South based on the DeFi mullet (fintech in the front, DeFi in the back). We started with on-off ramps as this opens the floodgates for liquidity. Our next step is to build a non-custodial wallet using account abstraction to enable use cases around savings and investing.