Cripto Latin Fest 2026: event recap from Bogotá

What Cripto Latin Fest 2026 was

The ninth edition of Cripto Latin Fest ran at Maloka, in Bogotá, from 26 to 28 August 2026. It was not one more crypto event: Bogotá's city government designated it an emblematic tourism event for the city, which is the kind of institutional backing this sector has been chasing for years and rarely gets.

The format split into two worlds:

• 26 August, Business Day. Closed, invitation only, with over 150 C-level executives, regulators, investment directors and infrastructure builders.
• 27 and 28, open stage. Talks, panels, technical workshops and networking, with more than 4,000 crypto and finance leaders from over 20 countries.

The main stage was a dome with 180-degree visual immersion. That sounds like a production detail and it is not: it completely changes how you hold the attention of four thousand people across two days.

Santiago Guzmán, the festival's general director, summed up the shift better than I could: Latin America "has stopped being a region of mere speculation" and become a place of everyday financial solutions built on stablecoins and Web3.

You could see it in the sponsors, who this year came from exchanges, mining, tokenisation and infrastructure: OKX, BingX, EMCD, Liquid Manzana, Boosty Labs, Utexo and the law firm Arias. When lawyers and regulators pay to be in the room, the conversation is no longer the same one.

My panel: what money will look like in 2050

I was on the panel about the future of money: where the monetary system is heading and what is left of it by 2050. It is a question that invites spectacle, which is exactly why I wanted to bring it down to earth.

Because the useful question is not whether money will be digital. That is already settled, and arguing about it wastes everyone's time. The question that matters is who sets its price once ninety-nine per cent of value moves on digital rails.

If the answer is still a central bank, then a good part of what this sector promised for a decade was marketing. And if it is not, someone has to explain who takes that seat, because the price of money does not go unowned.

That is the point where a conversation about 2050 stops being science fiction and becomes an infrastructure decision being made right now.

Money is going digital, but it still has a price

A couple of days after the event, Soren Azorian published an analysis on LinkedIn that lands almost exactly where our panel did. It is worth reading in full, but the core argument is this:

"Money is becoming digital — but digital money still has a price."

— Soren Azorian

His point is that Federal Reserve decisions do not stay inside traditional banking. They leak into the value of the dollar, the cost of capital, FX rates, market liquidity, digital-asset valuations and stablecoin economics. Crypto runs twenty-four seven, but it does not run outside the global monetary system.

That distinction is the one this industry loses most often. A stablecoin moves dollars faster and cheaper: that is real and it is enormous. What it does not do is take you out of inflation, out of interest rates, or out of the underlying value of the dollar it represents. It improves the transport of money, not its price.

And that connects straight back to the panel's question. If digital money still has a price, and that price is set off-chain, then 2050 is not decided in a protocol: it is decided by whoever controls the unit of account. Soren puts it without decoration, which is why I am citing him.

Where REDFi and Redline come in

None of this is theory for me. It is exactly the problem REDFi solves every day: secure access to dollars and digital assets from more than 120 countries, with no US residency, under institutional-grade custody with Fireblocks and BitGo.

If you accept the thesis that digital money is still tied to the dollar, the practical conclusion is not to run from the dollar. It is to reach it with less friction, from wherever you are, without depending on your country having the right banking relationship. That is what a founder in Panama, Bogotá or Tegucigalpa needs on Monday morning, not in 2050.

Soren builds from that same side: he founded REDFi, Redline Labs and BBR Tek, and works out of Panama on real-world asset tokenisation and decentralised finance. His read does not come from a theoretical model, it comes from moving real money every day, which is exactly why I take it seriously.

The networking: who was actually in the room

The quality of an event is not measured by headcount, it is measured by who you can run into in the hallway. And this year the mix was different.

The Business Day on the 26th concentrated over 150 people with decision-making power: C-level executives, regulators, investment directors and people building payment infrastructure. Not curious attendees, but the kind of profile that does not usually share an agenda with the community. And across the two open days there was representation from more than twenty countries, which in practice means the conversations were not about a single local market.

That changes the kind of conversation you have in the hallway. When the person next to you is solving compliance inside a bank or building payment rails in another country, the talk stops being about prices and starts being about how you build something that survives an audit. That, to me, is the only metric of an event worth measuring.

What I am taking away

Latin America has stopped debating whether crypto is useful. It now debates who builds the infrastructure, who regulates it and who collects the toll. That is a far less exciting conversation and a far more valuable one.

The next stage is COPASO 2026 in Panama City, on 16 and 17 September, where the topic is blockchain, AI and compliance. If that side of it interests you, I will see you there.

And if you are trying to land any of this inside your company —payments, AI applied to operations, or simply working out which part of this actually concerns you— write to me and we will look at your case directly. I also keep free resources with what I use myself, no paywall.