Neobank Yopaki Aims To Make Every Mexican A Bitcoiner

Company Name: Yopaki

Founders: Francisco Chavarria (CEO) and Carlos Chida (CTO)

Date Founded: March 2023

Location of Headquarters: Austin, TX

Number of Employees: Four full time; one part time

Website: https://www.yopaki.com/

Public or Private? Private

In 2021, Francisco Chavarria stood in the audience at Bitcoin 2021 and watched as Strike CEO Jack Mallers passionately delivered his now famous keynote speech during which he revealed that El Salvador planned to make bitcoin legal tender.

That moment sparked something within Chavarria.

“It was unlike anything I’d experienced in my professional career,” Chavarria told Bitcoin Magazine.

“I knew I had to do something in the Bitcoin space after that. It was the seed,” he added.

First-forward ahead two years, and Chavarria found himself putting his career as a Software as a Service (SaaS) consultant on hold to draw up the blueprints for Yopaki, a neobank and investment app with a Bitcoin-focus, aimed at serving the people of his home country, Mexico. (Users outside of Mexico can also use Yopaki’s non-custodial Lighting wallet.)

Since then, he and his co-founder, Carlos Chida, have been hard at work bringing Yopaki to life, including taking part in Wolf’s Bitcoin Accelerator program in efforts to make Yopaki as cutting-edge and dynamic as possible.

But before getting to that part of the story, let’s start with the cultural origin of the platform’s name.

What’s In A Name?

“The name Yopaki comes from the ancient language Nahuatl, the language spoken by the Aztecs,” explained Chavarria.

“The Aztecs lived in the center region of what today is Mexico, and they’re the ones responsible for some of the biggest pyramids in all of Latin America. The center of this historical place is called Teotihuacán, ‘the place of the gods,’” he added.

“The name itself, if I were to translate it into English, most closely means “the pursuit of happiness.’”

Judging by the name alone, it’s clear that Chavarria views Yopaki as more than just another business endeavor — he wants it to have a profound impact on those who use it.

And he’ll need the app to have such an impact if he and his team are to succeed in their mission: to turn every Mexican into a Bitcoiner.

2025 Dream Predictions for Bitcoin in Mexico 🇲🇽😶‍🌫️

1. Bitcoin adoption in Mexico surges.

2. Mexican Bitcoin startups attract global investors. With El Salvador’s influence, Mexico becomes the Latin American leader for Bitcoin innovation.

3. Peso-Bitcoin integration deepens.…

— Francisco Chavarria (@FranciscoBTC) December 31, 2024

Bitcoin In The Mexican Context

When Bitcoin is brought up in the context of Latin America and other developing regions, it’s often referenced as a tool to “bank the unbanked.”

However, Mexico’s banking system is “quite advanced,” according to Chavarria.

“The infrastructure has been built for people to have access to banking,” he explained.

“It may not be the same banking that we have in the U.S. (where Chavarria currently resides), but, for example, in Mexico, there are stores like 7/11s called OXXOs, and they’re everywhere. Any person can walk into an OXXO with an ID, and within 20 minutes, they can walk out with a Visa card and an app,” he added.

“It’s not exactly a bank, but it provides access to payment rails,” he added.

Chavarria went on to share that these Visa cards charge high fees, though.

“They’re very predatory in that sense,” he said.

So, Yopaki provides its Mexican users with access to three different monetary accounts: a Mexican peso account, a U.S. dollar account and a (non-custodial) bitcoin Lightning wallet. Each of these accounts lets their users transact at lower rates than said Visa cards. (In 2025, Yopaki will also enable its Mexican users to buy stocks, ETFs and other securities, as well.)

By offering a bitcoin wallet alongside accounts for traditional currencies, Chavarria hopes to legitimize bitcoin in the eyes of its users. However, he also feels that Yopaki has some work to do as far as helping Mexicans to get comfortable using bitcoin, which is why he and his team are doing what they can to make the process enjoyable.

Making Bitcoin Fun With Lotería

Lotería is a favorite pastime of the Mexican people. It’s comparable to Bingo but with images instead of numbers.

Chavarria and the Yopaki team included it into the app with a Bitcoin slant — concepts and characters like the Lightning Network and Max Keiser appear in the Yopaki version of the game.

“When it comes to Mexico, people think tequila, tacos, mariachi, and Lotería,” said Chavarria.

“There’s no negative connotation to the game. Because of this, the feedback we’ve received over the last couple of months has been, ‘Man, I didn’t realize that Bitcoin was fun,’” he added.

Users earn sats as they play Lotería within the app. When they’ve earned 1,000 sats or more, they can learn through the app how to transfer those sats from Yopaki’s custody into their own, all within the Yopaki app.

Yopaki teamed up with Breez to bring its users a non-custodial Lightning wallet that doesn’t require its users to to deal with the hassle of Lightning channel management.

Yopaki + Breez

“One of the main reasons we decided to go with Breez is that we knew about their implementation of the Nodeless SDK through Liquid before it was public,” said Chavarria.

“We know channel management is a fundamental roadblock for a lot of people in using an application like this. The second you introduce roadblocks the experience becomes scary. It’s just too much,” he added.

“So, in offering a product in which users can do an immediate transaction, that magic that we’ve all had as Bitcoiners can be brought to the masses.”

Chavarria went on to share that Yopaki’s Lightning wallet is so easy to use that even his mother-in-law is now using (and enjoying) the product.

He’s excited to bring such a product to the Mexican market, because, as he put it, Mexicans “have been rugged” by custodial solutions in the past.

“It’s important that we let users know that we don’t hold their funds,” said Chavarria.

Prioritizing Bitcoin Education

Not only does the Yopaki team encourage and prioritize self-sovereignty, but it also educates its users about Bitcoin, as it doesn’t underestimate their curiosity and ability to learn.

“We have curated content including lessons on broad topics like ‘What is money?’ — not just Bitcoin, but money,” explained Chavarria.

“They’re micro lessons that take anywhere from one to two minutes to complete. At the end of the day, it’s about creating a curiosity that I feel and I think a lot of us feel the legacy system has not really cared about,” he added.

The educational component within the app also sets it apart from its competitors in the region.

“Bitso is the largest player not just in Mexico but all of Latin America, and we have a lot of respect for what they’ve done, but they have turned into a casino with tokens and NFTs and all of that,” shared Chavarria. “We believe they have really underestimated the curiosity of their users and just triggered the degenerate gambling addiction side of things instead.”

Guidance From Wolf

Given how cool, calm and collected Chavarria was when I spoke with him, I got the impression that the now fleshed out vision for Yopaki came to him with relative ease, maybe even in a flash of light.

But he told me otherwise.

Apparently, he and Chida’s experience at Wolf’s Bitcoin startup incubator pushed them out of their comfort zone and into a state of mind that helped them to make Yopaki as unique as it is.

“It was one of the most important and meaningful experiences we could have gone through,” said Chavarria of his time at Wolf. “The type of feedback we received and the type of strategy sessions we had were, to say it nicely, brutal in a good way.”

Chavarria explained how he and Chida did, in fact, enter the Wolf program thinking they’d already crafted a solid vision for Yopaki, but that the guidance they received in the program is what pushed them to create many of the features that differentiate the apps for others like it.

“Having people like Kelly Brewster (Wolf’s CEO), who has years of experience at Goldman Sachs, and Ross Stevens (Wolf’s founder) really sit down and ask the tough questions and push you to the limit was powerful,” said Chavarria. “They made us really consider ‘Do you understand that what you’re doing is difficult?’ and made us articulate how we were going to execute our plan.”

The Year Ahead

As mentioned, Yopaki will enable its Mexican users to begin investing in traditional assets in the coming year and, starting next month, it will offer users a bitcoin exchange, as well.

What is more, it will issue its users debit cards that they can use to spend their pesos, dollars or bitcoin. And Chavarria says it plans to offer sats back rewards when users purchase either traditional assets or bitcoin via the app.

With so much coming down the pike, Chavarria is in good spirits.

“I’m just grateful that we’re doing this,” he said.

“It’s been really fun to build in the bear — now the good times are coming.”