- Miami-based Félix Pago closed a $200 million round on September 1, pushing its valuation to roughly $1.4 billion, one day before blockchain payments firm Kravata switched on zero-gas-fee transfers for 5 million users across Latin America.
- A federal tax that took effect January 1, 2026 charges 1% on cash and money-order transfers while leaving bank- and card-funded digital transfers untouched — a built-in advantage for app-based senders.
- Mexico's remittances fell 4.6% in 2025 to $61.79 billion, ending an 11-year growth streak, even as Honduras, Guatemala and Colombia posted double-digit gains.
- Global watchdog FATF found that stablecoins made up 84% of illicit crypto-asset transfers in 2025 — the same technology underpinning most of these "zero fee" apps.
Two rival bets on the future of sending money home landed 24 hours apart this week, and both leaned on the same pitch: fees are basically gone. Félix Pago, whose WhatsApp-based transfer service has become a fixture for Latino households sending dollars south, locked in fresh investor backing that roughly tripled its valuation. The very next day, Sui-based payments firm Kravata flipped on a network upgrade it says removes transaction costs for millions of existing users.
For the workers actually wiring paychecks home, the marketing headline is only part of the story. What decides how much cash lands on a family's table isn't the sticker price — it's the exchange rate spread, a new federal tax structure that treats cash and digital money differently, and security disclosures that vary wildly between an app that's been through years of banking-regulator scrutiny and one that launched a product update last week.
How the "Stablecoin Sandwich" Actually Moves Money
Félix Pago's product looks like an ordinary WhatsApp chat. Behind it, a sender's dollars get converted into Circle's USDC stablecoin, routed across a public blockchain, then converted back into pesos or reais by a local partner. CEO Manuel Godoy has his own name for the setup: a stablecoin sandwich, dollars on one end and local currency on the other, with the blockchain doing the work in between.
That architecture is what let a Mizuho analysis cited alongside the funding news put Félix's US-Mexico transfer costs under 1% — well below the 5% to 7% that correspondent-bank routing has historically charged on comparable transfers, according to World Bank pricing data. Testing with payout partner dLocal put delivery times under two minutes with a roughly 99% success rate. Worth noting: broader market averages have also been falling on their own. A separate industry review from the Inter-American Dialogue puts the region's effective 2025 average closer to 3%, once transaction size and provider mix are weighted in — a reminder that "cheaper than legacy banking" and "cheapest option available" aren't automatically the same claim.
Félix isn't the only company running this playbook. Remitly holds close to 23% of the US-to-Latin-America digital remittance market, up from 14% before it went public, and crypto exchange Bitso says it processed more than $6.5 billion in US-Mexico remittances during 2024 — over a tenth of that corridor's total volume, though that figure predates the current wave of launches by nearly two years.
A Tax Rule That Only Bites Cash Senders
The timing of this week's launches isn't coincidental. Under the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a 1% excise tax now applies whenever a sender funds a transfer with cash, a money order or a cashier's check — but a transfer paid from a bank account, debit card or digital wallet owes nothing extra. The Joint Committee on Taxation projected the Senate's 1% version would raise roughly $10 billion over a decade.
That structure lands hardest on senders who don't have — or don't trust — a US bank account, a population that skews toward Central American communities with lower rates of formal banking access. Electronic transfers already carried the overwhelming majority of money flowing into Mexico before the tax took effect, meaning the levy mostly squeezes a shrinking, cash-reliant minority rather than the market as a whole.
Mexico's overall remittance picture cooled regardless: inflows dropped 4.6% in 2025 to $61.79 billion, according to Banxico data compiled by BBVA Research, the country's first annual decline in 11 years. Other corridors moved the opposite direction over the same period — Honduras grew 25.3%, Guatemala 18.7%, El Salvador 17.8%, and Colombia 10.6%, per the same research, while Peru's central bank reported an 11.7% jump in remittances received.
Where "Zero Fee" Actually Hides the Cost
A wallet that waives its visible commission still has to make money somewhere, and the exchange rate is usually where. A provider can advertise no fee at all while quietly pricing the currency conversion a percentage point or two below the real market rate — pocketing the difference invisibly. One remittance-industry analysis framed it bluntly: skipping a stated fee while shaving 2% off the conversion rate can cost a sender more than a competitor that simply charges a flat $3 with no markup.
Kravata's own announcement illustrates a version of this. What went live on September 2 is described, in the company's and Sui's own language, as zero gas fee — the blockchain network's transaction cost — not necessarily a zero total fee for the sender. Those are different claims, and the distinction matters: a platform can legitimately eliminate gas costs while still charging its own transfer fee or absorbing margin through the exchange rate, exactly as legacy banks do.
The check any sender can run themselves is simple: look up the mid-market exchange rate on any currency converter, then compare it against what the app actually offers for the same amount. Whatever gap shows up there is the real cost, regardless of what the homepage advertises.
Two Launches, Two Different Regulatory Pictures
Félix Pago operates as a licensed money transmitter, which brings it under standard US consumer-protection and dispute-resolution frameworks that apply to regulated transfer providers. Newer stablecoin infrastructure doesn't always carry that same paper trail. Some coverage does describe Kravata as a regulated stablecoin platform, but neither its nor Sui's own launch materials detailed independent licensing audits — leaving that scrutiny to outside reporting and, for now, to users themselves.
That gap matters given what regulators are watching. The Financial Action Task Force's March 2026 report found stablecoins accounted for 84% of illicit crypto-asset transaction volume in 2025, driven largely by peer-to-peer transfers through unhosted wallets that bypass regulated intermediaries entirely — the same category of infrastructure, broadly speaking, that underpins this new generation of low-cost transfer apps, even when the specific platform itself is compliant.
Before Hitting Send
None of this means these apps are worse than what came before — for many senders, they're a genuine improvement. But "zero fee" is a claim to test, not take at face value. Run a small transfer first, check the delivered amount against the mid-market exchange rate, and confirm a platform is a licensed money transmitter before routing a full paycheck through it.
