When El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender, someone had to make it work. Ibex built the Lightning infrastructure behind Chivo Wallet and onboarded 3–4 million Salvadorans to their first-ever digital payment.
Jeremy Almond sits down with brothers Alvaro Sol (Co-founder, Chief of Staff & Strategy) and Juan Diego Sol (Regional Manager, Central America) of Ibex to go inside the rollout: treating Bitcoin as cash with a Lightning-only POS, the "money logistics" needed to settle through banks and SWIFT, and why there was no playbook for onboarding a country.
Five years later, Ibex is taking on a bigger challenge: bringing Central America's banks onto Bitcoin rails. They explain why Global South banks need $100–200M locked up at US correspondent banks just to send a wire, why remittances and B2B payments "all look the same" on Bitcoin, and how a "Trojan horse" approach helps institutions move forward one step at a time.
"People overestimate what can happen in one year and underestimate what can happen in five."
⏱ Timestamps:
00:00 Intro
01:00 Meet Alvaro & Juan Diego Sol
02:00 The brother who secretly interviewed at Ibex
03:30 From reinsurance to Bitcoin
05:00 2020: El Zonte and the road to the Bitcoin Law
07:00 Setting the rules: Ibex Pay and Lightning as cash
08:45 Powering Chivo Wallet: 4M people on Lightning
10:30 "There is no playbook"
12:00 Built in El Salvador, exported to the world
13:00 From merchants to institutions
16:00 Financial inclusion for banks, not just people
19:00 Bitcoin + stablecoins as LatAm's financial infrastructure
20:30 The Trojan horse strategy
22:30 What's next for El Salvador and Central America
26:30 Where to find Ibex
🔗 Follow the Guests:
Ibex: https://poweredbyibex.io
X: @poweredbyibex
Paystand: https://paystand.com
🎙️ Follow our Hosts:
Jeremy Almond – Twitter
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#Bitcoin #ElSalvador #Lightning #Stablecoins #LatAm #Banking #reDeFined