Last year, I went to a small Web3 conference in Bogotá. Talking to an established regenerative finance (ReFi) project from Latin America, my friend asked what wallet the community on the ground would use to access payouts.
“Umm, you know, all kinds of wallets,” was the response.
The problem wasn’t just that they hadn’t figured out a simple technical detail; it was that this detail wasn’t seen as central to the success of the project altogether. This wasn’t a new startup fumbling through logistics—and yet, solving through tokenomics, operations, and fundraising, they seemed to have forgotten about the most important thing: the user.
While this isn’t necessarily telling of the entire ecosystem in LATAM, it does hint at a reason why many blockchain impact projects have had a rather sober take-off in the region.
If it were just funding issues, we’d likely see more breakthroughs. Were it just regulations, we’d surely see more workarounds. Instead, the real challenge holding ReFi back in Latin America seems to be the fundamental gap between the technology being built and the communities it’s meant to serve.
When Tech Leads, But No One Follows
Coming up with the right solution doesn’t guarantee adoption. And, in ReFi, it’s even trickier: Whether it’s impact tokenisation, regenerative investment models, or community currencies, the innovation it brings isn’t only technological—it’s also economic.
Often, we see projects pushing their big vision to communities that haven’t even gone through basic decentralised finance (DeFi) onboarding. At a recent ReFi Medellín event, we spoke about this with our partner organisation, Salva Terra. We started brainstorming about how blockchain-based identity could solve a lot of their problems until David told us many of the farmers they work with don’t even have their own email addresses. Yes, setting up an email takes a few seconds—but shifting behaviors takes time, trust, and strong community ties, which many projects lack.
Using a self-custodial wallet might be a game-changer for a Colombian farmer. But skipping the groundwork to understand their context and behaviors means asking them to take 10 steps—while they haven’t even taken their first.
Wasabi from Kokonut Network, who does great work with local communities, pointed out the tendency in the ReFi space to believe in the “silver bullet”. Indeed, overreliance on a solution or the broader technology is reductionist and rarely pays off. Moss.Earth is one project that seemed to have made that mistake: With tokenised carbon credits and NFTs, they did see an initial hype but struggled to maintain traction as tokenised offsets failed to really integrate into existing conservation and financial systems at the time. The model itself was strong, but creating new ways to fund environmental protection is an entire value shift, and it doesn’t happen overnight.
On the other hand, a positive example is EthicHub. Instead of assuming farmers will instantly adapt to blockchain-based lending, they work through local nodes—trusted members of farming communities who act as bridges between smallholder farmers and DeFi tools. With some great work done with communities in Chiapas (Mexico) and beyond, they have managed to prioritise relationships and real-world usability over technology alone.
So, bringing Starlink to a community and having them transfer crypto doesn’t necessarily make it meaningful to them. Constanza Gómez of C Minds actually talked about this a lot to us in a ReFi Podcast episode: The issue isn’t whether people have access to technology, but whether the technology actually serves them.
Tap Into the Local Fabric—Or Perish
In Latin America, financial behavior isn’t dictated by tech-based accountability systems but by informal networks—cooperatives, family lending circles, and long-standing community institutions. It’s these actors that also shape how people in those communities manage risk, build resilience, and engage in economic exchange. Failing to recognise that is like planting a seed in depleted soil.
Technological adoption depends on cultural integration. Web3 often positions itself against existing institutions, but without leveraging the trust, capacity, knowledge, and systems that these actors have already built, adoption is an uphill battle.
It seems simple: ReFi in LATAM doesn’t need just better tech—it needs deeper roots.
Many ReFi projects lack clear commitments to long-term engagement, and in a region where external actors—whether governmental or technical—are often met with skepticism, trust requires more than a whitepaper and a bulletproof token model. But, sometimes, this is all communities get—especially as Web3 democratised access to capital and created a whole new range of impact actors. And then, ego plays a role too, especially when proving a concept becomes more urgent than proving its actual value.
I spoke to Carlos Melgar about how this led to a whole new market for opportunists:
"Far too often, we’re funding, platforming, and empowering talkers rather than doers. Many ReFi projects are led by individuals who, before discovering crypto, had no background in impact work. The accessibility of grants, coupled with uncompetitive impact markets that prioritise connections over measurable, consistent outcomes, fosters an environment ripe for opportunists, short-termers, and those more interested in cronyism than real impact."
ReFi on the ground isn’t, therefore, just struggling with utility—it’s also struggling with legitimacy. The conservation sector is a great example of this: Many communities already have deeply embedded systems for managing natural resources, where land rights, governance, and collective decision-making are central. Yet, ReFi projects often create their own models and roadmaps, failing to align with these structures.
One of my favorite use cases is Regen Network's project in Ecuador, which has established itself upon a strong institutional basis. Instead of imposing an entirely new system, they worked with Fundación Pachamama, the Amazon Sacred Headwaters Initiative, and more to develop “Jaguar Stewardship Credits”. This initiative supports Indigenous Achuar stewards in protecting 10,000 hectares of jaguar habitat in Pastaza, integrating blockchain-based incentives into their existing conservation practices. ERA Brazil played a key role in developing the project’s methodology, ensuring the credits aligned with both community governance norms and biodiversity monitoring frameworks.
Failing to build tools that fit into existing behaviors provides communities with little incentive to shift to entirely new ways of interacting with money. Understanding what already works for them—and how to protect it and expand it—is a whole new way of approaching design. These efforts form the foundation that will determine everything: whether a project gains legitimacy, adoption, strong partnerships, funding, and ultimately, whether ReFi as a whole succeeds in the region.
Moving in that direction means creating new spaces for collaboration, seeking honest feedback across stakeholders, and documenting what works—and what doesn’t. Even while working on this article, I noticed how few well-documented case studies exist on ReFi in LATAM, and that needs to change.
If the goal is to build financial systems that regenerate rather than extract, why repeat the same top-down patterns that created the problems in the first place? Regeneration is not just better products but also the way they show up in the world. Without trust, alignment, and real participation, ReFi risks becoming just another well-intentioned experiment that never quite delivers.
More by Tereza Bizkova
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This article represents the opinion of the author and does not necessarily reflect the editorial stance of CARBON Copy.