That's what got me thinking about primal. I feel it might be the best all in one option. What about debit card?
Ideally I'd want her to be able to use the debut card seamlessly without having to directly sell her pesos first. I want to eliminate as many steps as possible for her between zaps and use in the local market.
Once she has registered her debt card in the wallet, she can sell Bitcoin and have the money transferred to her bank account with just a couple of clicks.
Bitso and I think Nu Bank have BTC-linked MXN debit card accounts. Both are Brazil-based fintechs with consumer-focused apps which operate in Mexico. The exchange rate may not be the best, but they are both very convenient.
Another caveat about Bitso and Nu: Both are fully KYC and regulated by the CNBV, the Mexican financial regulator.
Rambling further:
Bitso doesn't appear to support the Lightning network (yet). I hope they get with it! It's really not practical to transfer BTC amounts below 2000 MXN without Lightning, in my opinion. So the UX flow would have to be accumulating greater amounts, then xfer to Bitso via an on-chain BTC TX, then withdrawing in pesos. No bueno. If that changes, or I'm wrong about this, I'll follow up with another post.
Nu, on the other hand, just put out a joint press release with Lightspark, announcing their support for Lightning transfers. I haven't tried it, if I do I'll follow up with another post.
https://www.lightspark.com/news/nubank-announcement
Ha, then neither of those debit cards have their own ATMs, so I'd expect about 20 pesos in fees for cash withdrawals. A better alternative would be to have a brick-and-mortar bank account (like BBVA or Banamex) and use SPEI to send pesos from Nu to that bank for ATM withdrawals. SPEI is fast, unlike US ACH.
Super informative 👌 I'll let her know her options
Too soon to use Nu for bitcoin yet — I see no bitcoin integration in their Mexican mobile app yet. Hopefully their devs are working on it and it will be available soon.
They do however offer 14.5% APY on MXN holdings — 15% if you lock it up for 4 weeks. I guess Nu get a lot of yield from their 99.9% APR on their credit card (not a misprint: 99.9% APR! sheesh! And I thought 20% was bad!), and share a fraction of it in exchange for collateralizing their business. Credit costs in Latin America are crazy. I guess the banks justify it by high default rates, but there appears to be a fair amount of egregious usury happening, usury which has long been outlawed in developed economies.
