Espacio Cripto and the Starknet Foundation are partnering up to drive innovation and accelerate startup growth across Latin America. At the heart of the initiative, is the Startup House in Monterrey: a hand-on place where top founders will build, collaborate, and gain access to Starknet's infrastructure, mentorship, and targeted grants.
This Request for Startups is a call to action. It highlights core challenges that define daily life across the region: inflation, exclusion, bureaucracy, informality, inefficiency. And more importantly, shows why and how crypto is ready to disrupt them.
We’re not here to imagine what crypto could do, we’re here to create what it must do.
Below, you’ll find examples of the kinds of startups we believe are worth pursuing. Use them as a launchpad. Remix them. Or ignore them entirely and bring your own edge.
The region is ready. The rails are here. The time to build is now.
Starknet is a Layer 2 blockchain that combines scalability, security, and user experience, all while inheriting the full trust guarantees of Ethereum. It's designed for real-world applications, not experiments. And for founders building in Latin America, that makes all the difference.
For founders solving hard problems in complex markets, Starknet offers the performance of a modern stack with the resilience of crypto-native infrastructure. It’s not just a place to prototype, it’s a place to scale.
Remittances, in Latin America, are a $163 billion dollar problem. In Mexico, remittance inflows are not only the largest in the world, with $64.7B USD in 2024, but also burdened by inefficiencies.
Traditional cross-border transactions are slow, expensive, and rely on multiple intermediaries, each adding extra costs and delays to the process. The average fee for sending remittances in the Mexico-U.S. corridor is 6%, which means Mexican families pay over $3 billion USD in fees annually, creating unnecessary friction for millions relying on money sent from abroad.
Blockchain technology, particularly stablecoins, offer a faster and cheaper alternative. Starknet’s infrastructure can enable high-thoughtput, low-cost transactions that can dramatically reduce fees to less than 1% while providing near-instant settlement. There is a very clear opportunity to build the bridges needed between fiat and crypto systems that will make remittances seamless for everyday users.
Latin America's economy is deeply intertwined with global trade, yet local businesses still face slow, costly international bank wires. The current payment system is broken, there's no way around it.
Small to medium businesses across Latam confront high payment processing fees, long settlement times, and complex banking relationships. In countries with high inflation, like Argentina (133%) and Venezuela (337%), people also struggle with rapidly devaluing currencies, making it even harder to preserve value in everyday transactions.
Stablecoins have risen as an answer to these issues. With their market cap of $235B breaking a new all-time high everyday, they have proven to be a reliable alternative to traditional payment systems in inflation-prone economies. There is a huge opportunity in this area to target businesses, individuals, or even both, leveraging Starknet's technology to provide a seamless, decentralized solution that preserves value and facilitates transactions.
Approximately 100 million people across Latin America lack or have difficulty acquiring formal identification due to the outdated identity verification process. This barrier prevents access to financial services, government benefits, healthcare, and formal employment, or in other words, things people need to live.
Additionally, identity theft is on the rise, with Colombia reporting a 409% increase in identity fraud since 2020. In Mexico, nearly 15% of the population have fallen victim to fraud, with 92% of cases being successful, illustrating the urgent need for a secure, modern identity system.
Blockchain technology, through decentralized IDs, offers a secure, private, and tamper-proof way to manage digital identities. The immutability of blockchain ensures that records cannot be altered, while Starknet’s ZK-proofs enable users to maintain privacy and control over their sensitive information, offering a more secure alternative to traditional identity systems.
We all heard about the AI agent craze in the last innings of 2024, and we all know that AI x Crypto is here to stay. Yet, we're only scratching the surface of the possibilities this synergy can unlock.
AI adoption in Latin America has grown by 67% over the last two years, with 38% of organizations planning AI workforce training. As AI continues to grow, it's clear that the future lies in leveraging decentralized networks to unlock new levels of autonomy, security, and scalability for AI systems.
The intersection of AI x Crypto is new, but it has opened Pandora's box and unleashed endless possibilities. This synergy enables the creation of autonomous AI systems that can interact directly with decentralized applications, manage data securely, and execute smart contracts, all while maintaining privacy and trust. Starknet’s scalability and low fees provide the perfect foundation to drive innovations across industries, from decentralized finance to healthcare and beyond.
Lack of transparency in supply chains leads to fraud, counterfeit goods, and mistrust, as companies and consumers often cannot verify a product's origin or journey.
Only 13% of companies have end-to-end visibility into their supply network, while 22% have no visibility beyond their Tier-1 suppliers. This opacity contributes to issues like counterfeit products costing the global economy over $500 billion a year.
Blockchain can serve as an immutable ledger for tracking goods from origin to store, allowing the verification of each step. Using Starknet’s scalable infrastructure, every supply chain event can be recorded securely at low cost, enabling a decentralized transparent supply chain where stakeholders and consumers can verify product authenticity and compliance in real-time.
Real estate is highly illiquid and requires large capital to enter, leaving property owners and small investors with limited flexibility. Selling properties is time consuming and expensive, but most don't bother, as they can't even invest in these assets at all.
Real estate is a $280 trillion industry where the rich get richer. As regulatory frameworks for digital assets mature across Latam, creating clearer paths for compliant tokenization are emerging, unlocking new opportunities for small investors, and for the builders who dare face this challenge.
Tokenizing real estate allows for fractional ownership, enabling anyone to invest and profit with minimal capital. Starknet's scalability, speed, and low fees, create the ideal ecosystem for this transformation.
Small farmers don't know about DeFi, but they should. They lack access to credits and markets, forcing them to rely on predatory lenders or sell crops immediately after harvest at low prices.
There are 15 million smallholder farmers in Latam, and including Africa and Asia, they face an estimated $170 billion annual financing shortfall. This gap prevents farmers from investing in better seeds, equipment, or storage, contributing to post-harvest losses and keeping them in poverty despite agriculture accounting for a large share of livelihoods in these regions.
Defi can bridge this financing gap by providing small farmers direct access to capital without relying on intermediaries. Tokenizing crops can help farmers secure loans or pre-sale agreements by offering a digital stake in their harvest. The possibilities are endless.
We all hate traditional insurance, with their high premiums and lengthy claim processes, leaving individuals and businesses either uninsured or waiting weeks for payouts after disasters or accidents.
The global insurance protection gap is around $1.8 trillion, for instance, about 60% of the $289 billion in losses from natural disasters in 2024 were uninsured. This means billions of people, especially in developing regions like Latam, have no safety net, and even those insured can face slow, obscure claims handling.
Blockchain can enable decentralized insurance pools and automated policies that pay out instantly when predefined conditions are met. By building on Starknet, such a system can handle many policies with low transaction costs and strong security, allowing communities to collectively fund and manage insurance, and ensuring fair, fast payouts without heavy bureaucracy.
Your mother loses 10-15% in commissions and processing when selling items online, this shouldn't happen. Online marketplaces are controlled by large platforms that charge significant fees and require traditional payment methods, excluding without access to banking services.
Latam's e-commerce sector is booming, reaching $180 billion in 2024 with 350 million people shopping online. Yet, 70% of Latin Americans are unbanked or underbanked, preventing many from fully participating. On top of that small sellers often lose a portion of their profits to commission and processing fees.
A decentralized marketplace would eliminate these barriers by enabling peer-to-peer buying and selling on the blockchain. Buyers and sellers could transact using crypto or stablecoins, with smart contracts handling escrow and dispute resolution. Starknet is the perfect place to make it happen.
Small-scale businesses face significant hurdles when obtaining affordable credit, forced to rely on high-interest loans from predatory sources. Traditional microfinance institutions are unable to meet demand due to high operational costs and an inefficient lending process, leaving millions without financial support.
In Latin America and the Caribbean, the financing gap for micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises is approximately 27% of the region’s GDP. Seven out of ten people lack a bank account, 100 million adults are unbanked or underbanked, highlighting a critical need for accessible financing solutions.
DeFi offers a decentralized solution by directly connecting borrowers with lenders through smart contracts, eliminating intermediaries and reducing transaction costs. With lower interest rates and faster processing times, DeFi platforms can provide small businesses with the capital they need. All powered through Starknet.
Latin America is home to over 450 million gamers. Despite spending more than $74B USD globally and annually on in-game items, players own nothing. Assets are locked inside platforms, can't be traded, and offer zero long-term value.
If you own a Cristiano Ronaldo card for your FIFA Ultimate Team and the new version drops, you're left with nothing. There’s no infrastructure for economic coordination, ownership, or monetization.
And that's a missed opportunity. Crypto turns games into economies. Players can own their items, sell their progress, and build worlds that live beyond the server. Starknet makes this possible with low fees, account abstraction, and onchain scalability. From item ownership to community-run economies, decentralized gaming isn’t just theory, it’s how games will be played.
This isn’t just a list of startup ideas, it’s a challenge. A map of broken systems, open questions, and the tools we finally have to do something about them.
From June 18–20 in Monterrey, the Starknet Startup House will gather the founders who are ready to make this real. Three days of building, mentorship, and workshops, with free accommodation, meals, and the chance to win $25,000 in grants.
Applications are open now. If you’ve made it this far, you know what to do.
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