Sati: Cryptocurrency Transfers in Mexico
🌎 Issue #48
It’s Tuesday, and today we are focusing on Sati, a Bitcoin payment service based in Mexico. Founded by Felipe Servin, the company recently raised $0.6 million in pre-seed funding from Boost VC, Draper Associates, Arcanum Capital, BitcoinFi Accelerator, and several angel investors.
The Product
Sending cryptocurrency to someone is a bit cumbersome. I’ve done like twice in my life and I wouldn’t say the process is fully optimized from the UX perspective.
Sati makes it easy by enabling users to send and receive Bitcoin, USDT and USDC through WhatsApp. From the user’s perspective, everything is straightforward: you open the WhatsApp bot, provide your crypto account name, select the currency and the amount you want to send, confirm the transaction, and that’s it, the transaction is executed immediately. Easy.
The real complexity lies in the back‑end.
Sati has built a semi‑custodial wallet system: keys are generated on the server and instantly encrypted with a user‑chosen PIN plus a hash of the phone number, so neither Sati nor an attacker can move funds without both. The stack has three layers—WaMa (wallet manager), an orchestration API, and multi‑bot front‑ends—and, if Meta ever blocks the WhatsApp bot, the same back‑end can spin up a Telegram or even SMS interface within hours. Finally, because the wallet rides Lightning rails—a fast, low‑cost second layer for Bitcoin—payments settle almost instantly.
The team is now enhancing the product with voice‑activated transfers, natural‑language commands, asset‑visibility toggles, and other quality‑of‑life features
The Business Model
There are three key value unlocks with Sati:
Access. Because everything happens inside WhatsApp, users skip the friction of downloading, updating, or learning a separate wallet app.
Speed. Lightning’s near-instant clearing delivers two benefits: (1) the obvious convenience of real-time transfers, and (2) immediate feedback if a payment fails, so users aren’t left wondering whether pesos or sats have vanished into a void.
Network effect. Every contact already stored in WhatsApp becomes a potential counter-party. That turns the existing social graph into a ready-made P2P and micro-merchant network, compounding utility for both individuals and in the future—small businesses as adoption grows.
Platform choice matters, too. Sati deliberately opted for WhatsApp rather than Telegram: WhatsApp’s penetration in the region is higher, yet, unlike Telegram, it offers almost no pre-existing crypto rails. That meant Sati had to build a their product from scratch, but it also faces far less direct competition with a larger TAM compared to Telegram
Monetization is straightforward and transparent. According to founder interviews, Sati currently levies:
0.9 % on ramps—moving between local fiat and BTC or stable-coins.
0.7–0.85 % on in-chat swaps—exchanging BTC for USDC/USDT (and vice-versa) entirely inside the wallet.
Looking ahead, the company plans to add merchant payments. If you want to pay your utility or data bill, the business would receive funds via WhatsApp bot. The product, Satipay, would open an additional revenue line, likely a small percentage per transaction.
The Local Angle
The WhatsApp factor
I often mention the 90% penetration and extremely high WhatsApp usage in Latin America that is driving WhatsApp-based businesses. But another two important components behind WhatsApp’s prominence are how carriers treat it and how deeply embedded it is in the mobile ecosystem. In Mexico, it is often pre-installed on phones and is free to use—carriers don’t charge users for data spent on it. Compare that to Telegram, which is twice less popular and doesn’t enjoy the same kind of treatment from carriers. Of course, those two things—carrier behavior and popularity—are connected, but still worth noting separately.
The result is an app that is used by almost everyone, including small merchants. It makes it much easier to imagine people adopting a payment feature built on top of that same app. Especially when it requires no onboarding, no separate UI, and no switching context mid-task.
High crypto adoption
Four of the top 20 countries in the global crypto adoption index are in Latin America, including Mexico at #13. The region is also the second-fastest growing globally, behind only Africa, when it comes to receiving cryptocurrency. But the market is still highly centralized—about 70% of that volume goes through centralized exchanges. The biggest one in Mexico is Bitso, which processed $12 billion in volume last year. That’s roughly 25% of all volume in Latin America.
Currency and remittances
Latin American currencies are prone to volatility. Last year, the Mexican peso lost 23% of its value against the dollar. The Colombian peso has also seen sharp swings. So if you’re holding savings in local currency, chances are that value won’t hold. As a store of value, these currencies fall short of what people actually need.
Then there’s remittances—a defining feature of the region’s economy. Latin America received $161 billion in remittances last year. Mexico alone took in $64 billion from the U.S., equivalent to 3.7% of its GDP. These flows come with fees—commissions charged by transfer providers, often per transaction. In Mexico, the cost can be low if the user relies on Directo a México, keeping the total below $5. But that’s the exception. In many other Latin American countries, average fees range between 4.5% and 11.8%, depending on the method and destination.
So, on the one hand, you have an unstable currency. On the other, you have a stable currency coming in—but you pay a commission on receiving that currency. For those two reasons, cryptocurrencies have become a staple in remittance transfers. The aforementioned Bitso already handles 10% of US-Mexico remittance flows.
The Roadblocks
WhatsApp Pay
WhatsApp offers its own payment feature, though it’s currently limited to India, Brazil, and Singapore. In India, it runs on top of UPI, a government-backed instant payment infrastructure that most other countries don’t have. Still, the feature is already there. If Meta decides to expand WhatsApp Pay into more Latin American markets, and it gains traction, it could easily sideline third-party tools built around payments—especially anything not natively integrated into the app.
A system that’s pre-installed, free to use, and fully embedded into the interface would be hard to compete with, regardless of how elegant your crypto layer is underneath.
WhatsApp as a platform
Building your house on rented land is always risky. When that house is a bot for transferring cryptocurrency, the risk doubles. Any changes to WhatsApp’s rules or its treatment of non-native payment systems could, at best, cut Sati’s addressable market in half. For now, Sati is small, and crypto transfers via WhatsApp aren’t a large or visible industry—so the company is mostly left alone. That said, there are already plenty of crypto scams on WhatsApp. If these problems grow, WhatsApp will have to respond—and when that happens, legitimate businesses may be affected along with the bad actors.
Regulation
Regulation in the crypto space is highly unpredictable. In Mexico, financial institutions are prohibited from offering custody, exchange, or transmission services involving cryptocurrencies. The Central Bank has also spoken out against crypto use on multiple occasions. This is not exactly a supportive environment for building a business—at best, the government is indifferent. At worst, it’s hostile.
The Upside
Cryptocurrency becoming a thing
Despite the hype, the capital, and the enthusiasm, cryptocurrency is still a niche. That doesn’t mean the market is small—but it hasn’t yet found a widely adopted, practical use case. You could argue that remittances are that use case, but there’s still room for traditional startups to reshape that space too—Tumoni in Nicaragua being one example. If crypto does eventually reshape the financial system—or uncovers an entirely new layer of use—it could shift the position of every player in the space.
Quick expansion
For a WhatsApp-based product solving a problem that affects much of the region, expansion should be relatively fast and face few barriers. Most Latin American countries rely heavily on remittances, share a common language, experience currency volatility, and have deep WhatsApp penetration. If regulations permit crypto-based transfers, Sati’s model could be replicated across borders with little friction.
WhatsApp becoming a true platform
Right now, you can build bots on WhatsApp, but that’s about as far as it goes. It’s not Windows. It’s not Shopify. WhatsApp is an aggregator, not a platform. But what if that changes? What if Meta decides to actually develop WhatsApp into a proper business layer? The ongoing AI wave might push it in that direction—making it easier for entrepreneurs to build digital-first businesses inside the app. WhatsApp still feels like the most underutilized product in Meta’s portfolio, especially given its scale. If it finally realizes that potential, users could grow more comfortable with transactional behaviors inside chats—and companies like Sati would benefit directly.
The Takeaway
Sati is one example of this dynamic, but more broadly, crypto tends to surface inefficiencies that traditional fintech later solves. Long-term, I don’t believe cryptocurrency will be adopted at mass scale. It will likely remain in the background—used in specific niches by true believers. Will everyone be buying bread with it? Probably not.