The problem Bando solves

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.

Challenges we ran into

The main challenges we faced were orchestrating liquidity and ensuring we could deploy the project in a way that made it long-lived from a regulatory and compliance perspective 🛡️.

The challenge of orchestrating liquidity involved finding a way to receive fiat deposits, convert them into USDC, bridge them to Base, and then convert them to other assets. We abstracted all those steps so that the user only sends their MXN and receives their assets on Base. We solved this problem by connecting the Mexican banking infrastructure, MXN-to-crypto liquidity built by the local exchange, and DeFi infrastructure that serves as a bridge and DEX aggregator. We used existing infrastructure, handling MXN deposits through KiilB, which provides the user with a bank account number for deposits. We then convert the MXN to USDC using local liquidity in Bitso (the largest crypto exchange in LATAM) and use LiFi for bridging and swapping. This liquidity orchestration was a challenge as it required deep technical knowledge on how to connect the different APIs from local fintech players and DeFi infrastructure.

The second challenge was ensuring that Bando is deployed in compliance with all legal and regulatory requirements 🙂. We needed to establish a robust legal and compliance infrastructure, which included having the right KYC and AML requirements, privacy policy, terms of use, and necessary licenses. We consulted several compliance and legal firms to confirm the feasibility of our model. As we expand, we will scale our legal and compliance efforts to match the scope of the product.

A final challenge is making sure we're builidng a healthy community based on our values of win and help win. With our learnings from Espacio Cripto we know that healthy communities take time and we're proud of where Bando's community is starting. We're starting to see a concentration of crypto workers and crypto enthusiast engage in the community. Join our Telegram community: https://t.me/bandocomunidad