Report contents
LATAM · Emerging
Mexico
Crypto Livability Index 2025·data to 31 Dec 2025
Scoreboard
Five pillars, then the 22 sub-pillars scored 0 to 4. Empty sub-scores are held out of the total, not zeroed.
The number behind the rank
| Raw capability score | 61 / 84 |
| P2P liquidity bonus (tie-breaker) | +3 |
| Inflation 4.7% · unbanked 47% · remittances 3.6% GDP · capital controls 0.3 · sanctions 0 | CNI 0.201 |
| Need multiplier | ×0.802 |
| Livability score | 0.583 |
Raw 61/84 = 0.726 capability. Crypto-Necessity Index 0.20, from five components: inflation 4.7% (three-year average 2023 to 2025), unbanked 47% of adults, remittances 3.6% of GDP, capital-control intensity 0.30 (KAOPEN 2023), sanctions exposure 0. Need multiplier ×0.80. Livability score 0.583, rank #14 of 79.
Three findings
The best-documented crypto remittance corridor on earth runs through here
Mexico received $64.7 billion in remittances in 2024, a record, and crypto rails carry roughly 11 to 12% of the US-to-Mexico flow: Bitso alone processed over $6.5 billion in 2024, and Felix Pago has settled more than $1 billion through a USDC-to-SPEI model that runs over WhatsApp. SPEI is the central-bank instant-payment system, and its native integration also gives Mexico a perfect 6/6 on utility bills, paid from a crypto balance straight to any 18-digit CLABE bank-account number.
One retail chain puts more than a thousand stores on Bitcoin
Grupo Elektra has accepted Bitcoin across 1,167 Mexican locations since December 2021, a single network that clears the 50-store merchant threshold more than twenty times over and dwarfs every other LATAM merchant footprint outside El Salvador.
Crypto gains taxed as income up to 35%, and no employer can pay a wage in it
Mexico folds individual crypto gains into the progressive ISR income scale, reaching 35% with no holding-period relief, pulling the tax sub-score to 1. Article 101 of the Federal Labour Law bars wages in anything but pesos, so crypto salary is tolerated only for freelancers, holding income legality to 2.
In one line
"Mexico did not need a crypto law to build the most-watched stablecoin corridor in the world. It needed migrants, a central-bank rail called SPEI, and a reason to skip the wire-transfer fee. The dollars now arrive on-chain."
Watch in 2026
Trajectory 2/4, stable, with genuinely no movement in 2025. The 2018 Fintech Law was one of the earliest virtual-asset frameworks anywhere and remains unchanged; the Banco de México has held its "sana distancia" policy keeping banks out of public crypto services since 2019. No bills were introduced, no consultations opened, and the regulatory sandbox still has zero authorised entrants. A retail central-bank digital currency floated for 2025 remains in early research and has slipped.