Two Years After the cMXP Proposal: What Would It Take to Build a Real MXN Corridor on Celo?
Hi Celo community,
Almost two years ago, I posted a proposal here for cMXP, a Mexican peso stablecoin built around Celo and Mento. You can read it here.
At the time, the problem looked straightforward: Celo had local-currency stablecoins in several markets, but no meaningful MXN-denominated infrastructure. The thesis was that adding the Mexican peso could unlock remittances, payments, merchants, and broader adoption in Mexico.
A lot has changed since then.
Mexico now has serious stablecoin payment infrastructure. Juno, a Bitso subsidiary, has launched MXNB and connected it directly to Mexican banking rails. Ripio has deployed wMXN on Celo. MiniPay has grown into a large stablecoin distribution network. Mento is increasingly focused on FX infrastructure. And Textile is already working with Ripio and Celo on institutional FX for LATAM local currencies.
What is still missing for Celo to become a meaningful MXN settlement corridor?
Over the past weeks I have been mapping that market, studying the current MXN stablecoin infrastructure, and analyzing MXNB’s public onchain activity.
I’d like to share my findings and insights with the community. Hoping it serves as literature and context for further reproducible development.
1. Bitso is a useful benchmark for where the Mexican market has moved
The clearest benchmark for the current market is Bitso. The largest crypto exchange in Latam.
In 2025, Bitso Business reported approximately US$82 billion in total payment volume across its B2B infrastructure. More than 1,900 companies have used its solutions.
In Mexico specifically, Bitso says its infrastructure enables more than US$15 billion per year in local collections and payouts, with those operations backed by Nvio Pagos México, an IFPE licensed and supervised by the CNBV (Bitso Business, 2026). Bitso Business
Those figures are already reported by Bitso in U.S. dollars; they are not MXN-to-USD conversions.
This is important because Bitso’s development suggests that stablecoin adoption in Mexico is not simply a retail-wallet story.
It is increasingly an infrastructure story:
local payment rails → compliance → FX → stablecoins → settlement → payouts
MXNB is one part of that infrastructure.
Juno, a Bitso subsidiary and the sole issuer of MXNB, allows qualified businesses to convert Mexican pesos into MXNB at a 1:1 ratio and redeem them back into fiat MXN (Juno, 2026a; Juno, 2026b). Trading
Through Juno’s infrastructure, a business can deposit MXN over SPEI and automatically trigger issuance of the equivalent amount of MXNB. MXNB can subsequently be redeemed into fiat MXN and transferred to an external Mexican bank account over SPEI (Juno, 2026c; Juno, 2026d). Trading
The interesting product is therefore not only the token.
It is the complete connection between Mexican banking infrastructure and blockchain settlement.
2. We analyzed what MXNB actually looks like onchain
I wanted a better benchmark than market cap or reported trading volume, so I ran an harness-assisted analysis analyzed 30 days of MXNB activity across Ethereum, Arbitrum, Avalanche, Polygon, and Base. Check out repo here.
The observation window ran from July 28 to August 27, 2026.
The dataset contains:
- 9,169 ERC-20 Transfer events
- 6,100 transactions
- 573 chain-qualified addresses
- mint/burn activity
- bridge flows
- DEX activity
- treasury/rebalancing activity
- transaction-level flow classification
At the end of the window, approximately 40.98 million MXNB were in circulation.
At MXNB’s 1:1 MXN peg, that represents a nominal value of approximately MX$40.98 million (~US$2.41 million). audit_metrics.jsonJSON
The raw transfer number was much larger:
4.209 billion MXNB.
But this is where the analysis became more useful.
Most of that number was not evidence of payments or user adoption. Large internal treasury and rebalancing flows accounted for the overwhelming majority of gross ERC-20 movement.
After removing mint/burn and bridge accounting, netting transaction flows, and conservatively excluding identified internal activity, approximately 73.83 million MXNB remained as an upper bound of adjusted onchain movement.
Nominally, that corresponds to approximately MX$73.83 million (~US$4.33 million).
It breaks down approximately as follows:
| Activity | MXNB | Nominal MXN value | Approx. USD value |
|---|---|---|---|
| DEX-related | 55.30M | MX$55.30M | ~US$3.25M |
| Non-DEX, unclassified | 18.54M | MX$18.54M | ~US$1.09M |
| Adjusted upper bound | 73.83M | MX$73.83M | ~US$4.33M |
audit_metrics.jsonJSON
There is an important caveat:
MX$73.83M is not verified payment volume.
Public blockchain data alone did not provide enough evidence to positively classify the residual flows as merchant payments, payroll, remittances, or other end-user economic activity.
The correct label for much of it remains simply:
unclassified. See full report to understand activity, or feed it to your chat/agent.
gh repo clone CeloMX/mxnb-30d-onchain-audit
3. What I think the MXNB analysis actually teaches us
Two findings seem particularly relevant for Celo.
is Gross onchain volume the best adoption metric?
A token can produce billions of units of ERC-20 movement through:
- issuance and redemption,
- bridging,
- treasury operations,
- rebalancing,
- market making,
- DEX routing.
That does not mean billions of pesos changed hands economically.
Is the industry mature and are we ready to attribute volume to actual settlement use cases?
Meaningful financial activity can start with relatively few participants
MXNB activity was extremely concentrated.
The top:
- 5 participants represented ~70% of adjusted movement;
- 10 represented ~81%;
- 25 represented ~96%;
- 50 represented ~99.5%.
research source: audit_metrics.jsonJSON
I don’t see concentration itself as a failure.
I think it suggests a different way to think about initial adoption.
You may not need hundreds of thousands of retail users to bootstrap meaningful local-currency flows.
A relatively small number of:
- businesses,
- payment companies,
- liquidity providers,
- market makers,
- payroll providers,
- exchanges,
- treasury operators
can establish recurring settlement and FX activity first.
Consumer distribution can then build on top of functioning financial infrastructure.
4. Celo also looks very different from two years ago
When we proposed cMXP, many of the pieces required for this corridor simply did not exist.
Today they do.
wMXN is already live on Celo
On July 31, Ripio launched its full wFIAT suite on Celo:
- wARS
- wBRL
- wMXN
- wCOP
- wPEN
- wCLP
Ripio describes these assets as 1:1 collateralized and backed by reserves held at regulated financial institutions (Ripio, 2026). Ripio Action
That materially changes the original cMXP thesis.
There is already an MXN-denominated asset available on Celo.
Before designing another one, I think we should determine how much real utility and settlement can be created using the infrastructure that already exists.
5. Textile is already showing what a LATAM FX network could look like
Ripio and Textile are not starting from zero either.
Textile currently supports wARS ↔ USDT and wBRL ↔ USDT on Celo, with institutional liquidity supplied by market makers.
Their stated direction is broader LATAM FX connectivity (Textile, 2026). Textile
An eventual:
wMXN ↔ USDT
and/or:
wMXN ↔ USDC
market seems strategically more important to me than simply adding another consumer swap button.
Businesses moving US$50,000, US$100,000 or US$500,000 need reliable execution, competitive FX and deeper liquidity.
Retail users need simplicity.
Those two problems do not necessarily need the same market structure.
6. Mento’s role is changing too
MGP-19 makes an important distinction between two pieces historically associated with Mento.
The proposal would transfer governance of Mento’s stable-asset issuance protocol to Celo Governance while refocusing Mento Labs on the Mento FX DEX (Mento, 2026). Celo Forum
That suggests a different role from the one I originally imagined for Mento in the original cMXP proposal.
Instead of:
Mento → issues every local currency
the future architecture could increasingly look like:
local currencies → Celo → Mento FX / other liquidity networks
I think one of the questions worth exploring is how Mento’s continuous onchain FX infrastructure and Textile’s institutional RFQ/market-maker model could complement each other rather than duplicate liquidity.
7. MiniPay changes the distribution equation
MiniPay may be the biggest difference between the 2024 and 2026 versions of this thesis.
In its Q1 2026 update, MiniPay reported:
- 16M+ wallet activations
- 470M+ transactions
- 66+ countries
- 50+ Mini Apps
- 400M+ Mini App transactions
In December 2025 alone, MiniPay users initiated more than US$96 million in USDT transfers and 3.5 million P2P USDT payments (MiniPay, 2026). Celo Forum
The important strategic consequence is simple:
Celo does not need to build stablecoin consumer distribution from zero.
The problem becomes connecting that distribution to useful Mexican financial rails.
8. There is already a Celo precedent for this model
Sikadesk is particularly interesting here.
The team recently reported more than US$75 million in transaction volume over 11 months, of which approximately US$68 million — 91% — occurred on Celo.
Their model connects stablecoins with bank accounts and mobile-money rails in African markets and is now integrated with MiniPay (Sikadesk, 2026). Celo Forum
I think this is a useful internal precedent.
The Mexico thesis is not necessarily:
build a wallet and hope users arrive.
It can be:
connect existing local financial rails to Celo settlement, establish recurring volume, and expose that infrastructure through MiniPay and other applications.
9. The gap I see today
Celo already has many of the individual components:
| Layer | Existing asset |
|---|---|
| Settlement | Celo |
| MXN-denominated asset | Ripio wMXN |
| USD liquidity | USDT / USDC |
| Consumer distribution | MiniPay |
| Protocol FX | Mento |
| Institutional FX | Textile |
| Mexico product/orchestration | Neon Payments |
| Mexican fiat/compliance edge | Still to be validated |
The missing piece appears to be coordination.
A functioning corridor could eventually look like:
Businesses / Users
│
┌──────────┴──────────┐
│ │
MiniPay Neon / APIs
│ │
└──────────┬──────────┘
│
Celo
│
┌─────────────┼─────────────┐
│ │ │
wMXN Mento FX Textile FX
│
regulated MXN edge
│
SPEI
│
Mexican banking system
The names and exact responsibilities in the lower part of this stack still need validation.
That is intentional.
The corridor should not depend on one application becoming a bank, an exchange, a stablecoin issuer, a market maker, and a compliance provider simultaneously.
10. Where could the first meaningful volume come from?
My current hypothesis is:
B2B settlement first, consumer distribution second.
Not because consumer adoption is unimportant.
Because recurring business flows can bootstrap the corridor much faster.
Cross-border B2B
A Mexican company could eventually move:
MXN
↓
regulated SPEI ramp
↓
wMXN
↓
Celo FX
↓
USDC / USDT
↓
international counterparty
with the same route working in reverse.
Payroll and contractors
USDC / USDT
↓
Celo
↓
MXN FX
↓
wMXN
↓
MiniPay / Neon
↓
Mexican recipient
↓
SPEI / P2P / spend
Stablecoin-native remittances
Instead of trying to replace the entire remittance industry on day one, a narrower starting point is:
someone already holding USDT/USDC abroad → a Mexican recipient who needs usable pesos locally.
These flows create something retail incentives cannot manufacture easily:
recurring demand for actual FX and settlement.
11. What should we measure?
- wallet downloads,
- social followers,
- event attendance,
- raw ERC-20 volume,
- or incentivized TVL
as primary indicators of success?
The metric I think is the most important:
How much attributable, recurring MXN-denominated economic flow can Celo actually settle?
A potential progression might be:
| Stage | Monthly attributable settlement |
|---|---|
| Initial validation | MX$5M (~US$294k) |
| Corridor validation | MX$25M (~US$1.47M) |
| Meaningful scale | MX$100M (~US$5.87M) |
These aren’t proposed milestones, rather, they come from my research and talking to Textile Protocol’s Founder Tomer Bariach, as (50K/day on/off ramping volume) a desired threshold to validate market and the Mexican state-of-the-market research I realized.
Prezenti Season 3 is explicitly asking teams to optimize for outcomes that the community can independently verify: transaction/TVL growth, greater use of MiniPay’s distribution, infrastructure others can use, and measurable network benefit rather than broad promises or vanity metrics (Prezenti, 2026). Celo Forum
That seems like the right standard for helping enable the Mexican corridor to onboard more builders in the region.
12. The regulated edge is part of the architecture
Bitso/Juno also makes something else clear.
SPEI connectivity, KYC/KYB, issuance, redemption, transaction monitoring and banking infrastructure cannot be treated as details to solve after launch.
They are part of the product.
I don’t think Neon — or another Celo application — should try to reproduce Bitso’s entire regulated stack.
A more realistic architecture is:
regulated Mexican infrastructure
↓
MXN / SPEI / compliance
↓
stablecoin layer
↓
Celo + FX
↓
non-custodial applications
↓
MiniPay / businesses / users
We are currently researching which regulated partners and a legal structure would be required for this in Mexico. What can be the best route?
That work needs to happen before treating the architecture as settled.
13. From cMXP to an MXN corridor
Two years ago, our question was:
How do we put the Mexican peso on Celo?
The market has partly answered that question for us.
Today Celo has wMXN.
MiniPay has meaningful distribution.
Mento has a clearer FX direction.
Textile and Ripio are already building LATAM FX corridors.
And Bitso/Juno has demonstrated that Mexican banking rails and stablecoin settlement can be combined into substantial financial infrastructure.
So my working thesis has changed.
The opportunity may no longer be to build another Mexican stablecoin.
It may be to build the shared corridor connecting Mexican pesos, regulated financial rails, onchain FX, Celo settlement and distribution.
I am provisionally calling that:
Celo Mexico Stablecoin Corridor
Neon Payments could be one application and orchestration layer built on top of it.
But I think the infrastructure itself should be useful to more than Neon.
Temperatur-check
I would like to open the thread for community conversation on the next topics.
1. Is B2B settlement first → consumer distribution second the right entry strategy for Mexico?
Or are there existing MiniPay use cases that suggest the opposite?
2. Should the corridor remain issuer-neutral?
wMXN exists on Celo today, but I see no architectural reason to prevent MXNB or future MXN assets from participating if integrations become possible.
3. How should the FX/liquidity stack be divided?
Where should Mento, Textile/institutional market makers and ordinary DEX liquidity each fit?
4. What is actually missing for MiniPay to work meaningfully in Mexico?
Is the main constraint:
- MXN liquidity?
- SPEI cash-in/cash-out?
- card distribution?
- local merchant/payment utility?
- regulatory infrastructure?
- Mini Apps?
- something else?
Feedback from the MiniPay, Mento, Ripio, payments, stablecoin and LATAM communities would be particularly useful.
If the current layout architecture survives that pressure test, the next step should be to validate the missing infrastructure with the relevant teams, identify the first recurring B2B design partners and convert the thesis into a measurable deployment plan.
Two years ago, the question was whether Celo needed a Mexican peso stablecoin.
I think the more interesting question in 2026 is:
Can we make Mexican pesos actually move through Celo at meaningful scale?
Neon Payment note
During 2025 EthGlobal Buenos Aires, the @CeloMexicoHub presented neonpay.celo.mx, at Celo’s sponsored track, designed to fit the missing stablecoins in MiniPay. A simple miniapp/webapp for sending, receiving, swapping and holding Mento and now Ripio stablecoins (in my opinion, the missing layers in MiniPay) for the Latam market.
The arrival of the wMXN thrilled us, and now you can test it live on mainnet, currently swapping wARS-USDT (wBRL pair’s liquidity was removed recently), and we are waiting next week for Textile protocol to add liquidity for the wMXN as discussed during our last call, so we start experimenting.
The missing pieces for experimenting:
While grabbing NeonPay again to update the code, we noticed that the missing layer for builders is to have a steady route for onboarding, and in our experience, embedded wallets and Account Abstraction still shows a fragmented builder onboarding stack. Therefore, we created a simple primitive, a wrapper and SDK, to allow builders to test and experiment multiple embedded-wallet providers (Privy, ThirdWeb, Human.tech’s WaaP and a MiniPay environment passthrough), and play with each providers behavior.
Feel free to test it out here.
Currency note
For readability, MXN-denominated figures above include approximate U.S. dollar equivalents using an indicative reference rate of MX$17.03 = US$1 on August 28, 2026. USD equivalents are rounded and are provided only for international comparison.
MXNB figures refer to token units. Their nominal MXN equivalents assume MXNB’s stated 1:1 MXN peg and should not be interpreted as verified fiat payment volume.
References
Bitso Business. (2026). Real-time money. Bitso.
Bitso Business — Real-time money report
Juno. (2026a). Glossary. Bitso Developer Documentation.
Juno — Glossary
Juno. (2026b). Overview of basic operations. Bitso Developer Documentation.
Juno — Overview of Basic Operations
Juno. (2026c). Trigger an MXNB token issuance. Bitso Developer Documentation.
Juno — Trigger an MXNB Token Issuance
Juno. (2026d). Redeem your MXNB tokens. Bitso Developer Documentation.
Juno — Redeem Your MXNB Tokens
Juno. (2025). MXNB whitepaper.
MXNB Whitepaper
MiniPay. (2026). MiniPay Update Q1 2026. Celo Forum.
MiniPay Update Q1 2026
Mento. (2026). MGP-19: Bringing Mento Stable Asset Issuance Home to Celo Governance. Celo Forum.
MGP-19 on the Celo Forum
Prezenti. (2026). Prezenti Season 3 Is Open: Frontier, Anchor and Boost Grants for Celo. Celo Forum.
Prezenti Season 3 announcement
Ripio. (2026). Las stablecoins wFIAT ya están disponibles en Celo.
Ripio — wFIAT on Celo
Sikadesk. (2026). Sikadesk is Live on MiniPay: Expanding Stablecoin Utility Across the Celo Ecosystem. Celo Forum.
Sikadesk on MiniPay
Textile. (2026). Textile, Ripio, and Celo collaborate to create the cheapest way to move between the real and the peso.
Textile — Ripio × Celo wFIAT corridor