In February 2021, the Brazilian Open Banking initiative later rebranded to Open Finance, started its first phase. Three years later, more than 56 billion clients/transactional data API calls were made, and more than 28 million people consented to share their data. Despite these impressive numbers, one question remains: Has the Brazilian Open Finance Succeeded? Spoiler alert, not yet!

Blockchain is still a nascent technology, and as such, many problems are associated with user experience (UX), with there being some major problems that need to be addressed that we will discuss in this article. Lack of friendly User Interfaces (UI), language, lack of standardization, complexity, key management, and security are some of these issues.

In order to reach mass adoption, blockchain must be regulated. Without proper regulation, industry players are forced to operate in a gray zone, in which what's legal or illegal is unclear. In this environment, an adverse selection effect takes place; malicious players can thrive by exploiting the lack of rules and lack of comprehension of risks from clients, while well-intentioned players and big institutions are kept outside or operate in a restricted way, losing competitiveness.

Infrastructure scalability is arguably the most pressing problem in the Blockchain industry. Even though security and UX are big issues, the ability to handle high transactional volumes is key to growth. The current infrastructure is unprepared to deal with the rise of dApps, and crypto games.

In our previous article, we addressed our view about opportunities for blockchain technology in LATAM and why this region might be fertile ground for mass adoption. We now present our vision for the future of crypto, and why we believe that investing in the space now has the potential to generate outsized returns.

Throughout modern history, emerging economies have suffered from political, social and economic instability. Bad monetary policy - namely, unbridled money printing - led to hyperinflation in many countries in LATAM (in December/2022 numbers, Argentina - 95%, Venezuela - 156%), and with the lack of basic financial infrastructure, many people have been left at the margin of the financial system (despite the recent advancements, still 70% of LATAM population is unbanked or underbanked).

An analysis of the circumstances that led crypto to the current bear market and some insights about the next bull.