04-16-2025 
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“To forge a future that defies the ordinary” was the message of MERGE Conference 2025, which took place over the course of three days in Buenos Aires this March.
Selling itself as “the world’s most disruptive Web3 event,” the annual business-focused, cross-continental conference was designed to bridge the gap between the European and the booming Latin American ecosystems.
To live up to this ambitious moniker, the first part of the two-leg summit took place in Argentina and brought together (in its own words) the “brightest minds and boldest ideas in the industry” for three days of talks, panels, product demonstration and schmoozing, all focused on the ideas driving the evolution of Web3 and Blockchain technology—while a further event is planned for October in Madrid.
One such mind was Martin Coxall, Director of Growth at BSV Association, a Swiss-based non-profit organization that acts as the governing body and global steward of the BSV blockchain. Coxall featured on two panels during the conference: one focused on Web3’s ability to modernize the state, and the other focused on the equally hot topic of stablecoins, central bank digital currencies (CBDCs) and tokenized cash.
“The interesting thing about MERGE is they have this whole approach where they do two conferences every year, one always in Madrid and the other bounces around Latin America,” explains Coxall, speaking with CoinGeek after the event.
“The premise is that there’s not just a link of language and culture between Latin America and Spain, but if you look at most of the biggest tech institutions in Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia, they all lead back to Spain or the United States.”
For this reason, Coxall suggests, going to LatAm represents “an expansion of a presence in both Europe and US at the same time, which is a priority for BSV.”
It’s also true that, right now, the timing couldn’t be better for a blockchain focused on utility and mass adoption to pitch itself in LatAm.
A fitting host
For Coxall’s stablecoin and CBDCs panel, Buenos Aires made a particularly apt backdrop for the discussion: it’s a country with one of the world’s highest rates of stablecoin adoption. In 2024, blockchain analysis site Chainalysis published a report finding that Argentina’s share of stablecoin transaction volume is 61.8%, coming in ahead of Brazil’s (59.8%) and well above the global average (44.7%). The report went on to explain this booming market as a symptom of the country’s “decades-long battle with inflation and the Argentine peso’s (ARS) devaluation.”
This persistent inflation has led to a general lack of faith in the country’s fiat currency, encouraging Argentine citizens to search for a more ‘stable’ alternatives to protect their savings.
“Argentina’s financial instability comes from years of decades of mismanagement, and the currency is worthless,” says Coxall. “But they have other problems too, such as corruption.”
This situation is not unique to Argentina in the LatAm region: neighbors Brazil, Chile, Peru and Bolivia can all point to their own recent examples of political and fiscal mismanagement, often worsened by endemic corruption.
However, an increased willingness to embrace new technologies is running parallel to this unfortunate regional trend—and perhaps in part inspired by it.
“We’re talking about countries which have adoption much higher, much faster than anything we know in Europe or North America,” suggests Coxall. “A good example is people in South America going, in a short time, from having no Internet at home to having 4G, 5G connected phones with better bandwidth than we knew until the mid-2010s. So, the adoption curve of all technology is much faster and higher than in the western hemisphere.”
There are stats to back this up as well. Based on Atlántico’s Latin America Digital Transformation Report 2023, between 2012 and 2022, internet penetration in LatAm went from 43% to 78%, surpassing that of China during the same period, where penetration rose from 42% to 74%.
According to Coxall, this trend for rapid adoption of new technologies, combined with the equally strong—but far less desirable—regional trend for economic mismanagement and political scandal, has created the perfect scenario for blockchain technology to step in and prove its worth.
“My belief is that blockchain can help solve some endemic issues these countries’ economies and societies have, like fraud and corruption,” he says, offering the example of blockchain for voting systems, “to avoid manipulation of ballots, which is a common issue across the world.”
Another use case where Coxall believes blockchain and its immutable ledger can prove its worth—in the LatAm region and beyond—is dealing with the global scourge of money laundering.
“On the laundering aspect, transactions are all on-chain, so you can get rid of the problem of not knowing where the money is coming from and where it’s going,” he explains.
Thus, in LatAm, some problems need solving and technologies that can solve them; what is needed is an increased awareness that these solutions exist and greater education on exactly how they work. Enter MERGE conference.
Stablecoin and CBDC
The MERGE event covered a broad sweep of Web3 and blockchain topics, from regulation, renewable energy and quantum computing to exchange-traded products (ETFs), artificial intelligence (AI) and real estate. Amongst these diverse subjects, Coxall says several key themes emerged, one of the main ones being “lots of focus on stablecoins and CBDCs.”
The BSV Association’s growth chief had a particularly good vantage point to observe and participate in this discussion, as one of the MERGE panels in which he took part was titled “Stablecoins, CBDCs and Tokenized Cash: Implications in LatAm.”
Along with fellow panellists Juliana Schlesinger, Chief Revenue Officer of Transfero Group, and Magdeila Rivas, Director of Global Partnerships at Notabene, Coxall took part in a discussion that raked over some of the issues in this area, including which technologies are being embraced in LatAm, and by whom.
“The consensus on the panel was that both stablecoins and CBDCs are the way forward,” says Coxall, who points to the example of Brazil, where the government has been exploring a digital version of the Brazilian Real, called ‘Drex,’ initially to be a wholesale CBDC for use in inter-bank payments, and where Stablecoins now account for approximately 70% of the share of indirect flows from Brazil’s local exchanges to global exchanges.
However, not every country is exploring both stablecoins and CBDCs, with the latter being decidedly out of favor with the current Argentine administration.
In 2023, the country saw the election of the self-declared libertarian “anarcho-capitalist” Javier Milei as president after running on a platform of blowing up the central bank and slashing the bloated government. Along with some of his more unhinged populist tendencies, Milei also happens to be a fan of blockchain technology, telling local news network Clarin in January 2023, “what Bitcoin represents is the return of money to its original creator — the private sector,” adding that “Bitcoin is the natural reaction against the central bank scammers and to make money private again.”
Milei is a blockchain-supportive, pro-private sector fanatic at the head of a country with numerous longstanding socio-economic and political issues that need solving.
In other words, it is a marriage made in heaven for blockchain, as explained by Coxall: “The whole platform that Javier Milei was elected on, to come and shake things up, there’s a use case for Blockchain in all these areas.”In terms of digital money, part of this shake-up involves encouraging stablecoins and—consistent with his view on the central bank—discouraging a CBDC. This is more in line with the U.S., where anti-CBDC sentiment is strong, compared to the likes of the European Union (EU), the United Kingdom and Japan, all of whom are exploring a CBDC.
While U.S. politicians cite dubious claims about privacy and state surveillance as their reason for shunning the technology, the situation in Argentina is somewhat different, where Coxall believes the decision to explore U.S. dollar stablecoins over CBDC may be more justified:
“This is the correct feeling. Milei wants to dollarize the economy and a U.S. stablecoin fits right in there. A Pesos CBDC doesn’t. Also, unlike in other countries the central bank is not as independent/autonomous, so it’s likely his views will be carried out, if he survives politically.”
He also suggests that while enthusiasm and adoption are high in LatAm, particularly in the case of stablecoins, across the region, “there is still a wait and see approach here… LatAm as a whole is keeping close tabs on the evolving regulatory situation in the U.S. and EU.”
Specifically, Coxall points to the progress of proposed U.S. stablecoin legislation, such as the Genius Act, and how the EU’s Markets in Crypto Assets (MiCA) regulation—the stablecoin provisions that came into force last July—is playing out.
However, digital currency—whether stablecoin or CBDC—wasn’t the only prominent topic at the conference; it also explored how blockchain technology is already making a real-world difference for people in LatAm. One prominent example was the area of ‘identity.’
Blockchain proving its worth
The second panel Coxall took part in was titled ‘The Role of Web3 in Modernizing the State,’ from which his main takeaway was “that it’s already happening.”
According to Coxall “the best example of this is the QUARK ID app deployed by the city of Buenos Aires, putting all citizens IDs on chain.”
The project that he refers to was the successful 2024 launch of QuirkID in Buenos Aires, a blockchain-based digital ID system for its 3.6 million citizens, which aimed to give them more control over their personal data while improving privacy and security.
Similar projects have been introduced in other LatAm countries—for example, in September 2023, the government of Brazil revealed plans to implement blockchain technology for its digital ID system for over 214 million citizens—again demonstrating the region’s greater willingness to explore such innovative solutions, in contrast to many comparatively slow-off-the-mark’ first world’ countries.
As Coxall notes, LatAm is ahead of the curve when it comes to large-scale digital ID projects being rolled out.
“Argentina has implemented to a degree blockchain-based identity solutions for its citizens, specifically in Buenos Aires. European countries haven’t done that yet, the UK doesn’t have that either. This is an emerging market country. It’s actually ID cards on chain. It goes to show [that] adoption isn’t always in the first world.”
It could be that, in comparison to their European counterparts, the low incomes and large populations of LatAm countries—the four most populous Latin American countries (Brazil, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina) together hold more than half the population of all 47 European nations combined—encourage faster exploration and adoption of technologies that can streamline unwieldy and expensive bureaucracies and processes, such as those involved in ID.
If this is the case, there’s huge potential in LatAm for blockchain technology to take root and thrive, particularly any blockchain that can offer massive scalability and microtransactions.
This is where BSV comes into the picture and why its steward organization was represented at the MERGE conference.
BSV and the Association on the road
BSV Association joined the MERGE conference as a ‘Silver Sponsor’ on March 20, saying at the time that it hoped to “focus on its capability to drive financial inclusion, economic growth and its ability to seamlessly connect the region to the global economy.”
In terms of how it can do this, according to the Association, BSV blockchain is “a scalable and energy-efficient public blockchain designed for enterprise and government applications, offering unbounded scaling, low transaction fees, and robust security.”
This was demonstrated by BSV’s ‘Teranode upgrade,’ which recently processed 3 million transactions per second in a test scenario.
“Teranode is still a big component for the Association,” says Coxall, who is keen to reiterate this record whilst admitting that it is an achievement that needs to be built upon and transferred into real-world scenarios.
“It’s been a couple years since we’ve had the record of 200 million transactions processed in 24 hours. We need to get BSV companies to do a massive stress test on the network to show that it doesn’t just work in theory, that it actually works in the real world, for real data,” says Coxall.
He adds, “We want to see it mining blocks by the end of the year on the main net.”
To achieve this, BSV Association’s “growth” chief argues that education is key—getting more Governments and businesses, as well as developers, politicians and average joes, to understand blockchain—generally, and in particular, what BSV can offer. Hence why BSV Association is out there at Merge Buenos Aires to spread the gospel.
“Education is [a] big part, whether that’s academic education or educating developers,” says Coxall. “We have an online course, and we’re also promoting various coins at universities, particularly in Spain. Those Spanish universities have deep ties into Latin America, so they can help us distribute the course to more LatAm students— hundreds of millions of students instead of just the other 50 million people that live in Spain.”
When it comes to this educating mission, MERGE conference proved a success, at least from Coxall’s perspective, and he sums up his experience of the event as “very good—we’ll come again—it’s exactly the kind of event where BSV Association and BSV needs to be. In fact, we’re already committed to their next event in Madrid in Q4.”
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