The global cryptocurrency industry saw its ‘mainstream’ moment in 2025 when its market cap hit $4 trillion for the first time, resulting in a surge of institutional adoption.

As big names like Visa, BlackRock, JPMorgan, and Stripe embraced crypto, some of the largest technology services companies also jumped on the bandwagon with goals to offer dedicated crypto-as-a-service to institutional players.

A year on, that business has been slow to arrive, which raises two questions for the cross-border knowledge economy: how much of the new crypto engineering work is reaching large systems integrators (SIs), and what, if anything, is reaching nearshore teams in Latin America?