Brazil Crypto Report

Hey everyone,

Guillermo Goncalvez is CEO of El Dorado. I caught up with him at Bitso’s Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City last month to discuss El Dorado’s new $9 million Series A round and its expansion into B2B payments.

El Dorado’s move into business accounts signals a broader shift as consumer-first stablecoin apps in Latin America start building infrastructure for the small and medium-sized businesses that traditional banks have largely ignored.

The raise also lands as Goncalvez, who is Venezuelan, sees renewed international investor interest in Venezuela’s financial sector after years of isolation.

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Bits & Borders is Presented by Sumsub

Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub’s internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub’s customer base.

Some of the key global highlights include:

* Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

* Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

* Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Key takeaways:

* El Dorado closed a $9 million Series A led by Paradigm, with Coinbase Ventures also participating.

* The round funds El Dorado’s expansion into a B2B product, giving businesses virtual dollar accounts for global operations, particularly useful for import and export companies.

* Latin America’s cross-border payment market is worth close to $800 billion annually, and about 60% of that is B2B, mostly imports and exports.

* El Dorado’s consumer app already serves over a million users across 12 Latin American countries and ranks among the top 10 most downloaded financial apps in Bolivia.

* The company is cutting remittance fees by up to 80-90% on underserved corridors like Brazil-to-Bolivia and Argentina-to-Bolivia, charging around 1% compared to the 10-12% spreads charged through traditional channels.

* El Dorado is building its B2B infrastructure on Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain built by veterans of Stripe and Paradigm, which Goncalvez says will let the company automate more of its payment flows over time.

I enjoyed this conversation with Guillermo and I hope you do as well. You can connect with him on Linkedin.

Have a great weekend everybody

-AWS

Recent Episodes

Hey everyone,

Bernardo Brites and Rafael Luz are co-founders of Trace Finance, a Brazilian cross-border payments infrastructure company.

I caught up with them at Bitso Business’ Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City last month to discuss the company’s $32 million Series A and the launch of a BRL-backed stablecoin.

Trace Finance has been building stablecoin rails for Brazil since 2019, long before the current wave of cross-border payment startups. The timing of their raise reflects growing investor conviction in the Latam corridor and a regulatory environment that is pushing serious volume toward licensed, bank-backed operators.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Bits & Borders is Presented by Sumsub

Sumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub’s internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub’s customer base.

Some of the key global highlights include:

* Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

* Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

* Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Key takeaways from this episode

* Trace Finance closed a $32 million Series A led by CoinFund, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Jump, Paxos, the founder of Solana, and Toly, founder of Circle, and others.

* The company is launching what it says will be the largest BRL-backed stablecoin, designed to give global companies access to Brazilian real for the first time without navigating Brazil’s strict capital controls.

* Brazil’s new PSAV regulation caps VASP-licensed crypto companies at $100,000 per cross-border transaction, effectively locking them out of large corporate flows. This is a structural advantage for Trace, which operates under a bank-adjacent structure with no transaction cap.

* The BRL stablecoin could cut FX costs for small and mid-sized importers and exporters from 300 basis points to as low as 2 basis points by pooling volume that currently sits fragmented across individual companies.

* Trace is already processing payments for some of Brazil’s largest e-commerce, streaming, travel, and mobility players, and recently joined the Mastercard Start Path program as it targets global PSPs and enterprise clients.

* The co-founders see the future of cross-border stablecoins as a loss-leader that drives customers toward higher-margin products like credit and yield, the same playbook traditional banks have used for decades with trade finance.

I enjoyed this conversation with Bernardo and Rafael and I hope you do as well. You can connect with both of them on Linkedin.

Have a great weekend everybody.

-AWS

Recent Episodes

Hey everyone!

I caught up with Caliza CEO Ezra Kebrab at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City earlier this month.

We sat down to discuss how Caliza is helping companies move cross-border supplier and treasury payments, with most volume originating in Brazil and Mexico and flowing to China, Hong Kong, and the US.

Kebrab’s path ran through a peer-to-peer wallet startup sold to Square in 2013, then Visa, where he watched Pix and real-time payments take off in Brazil.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

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That experience exposed a gap: domestic rails kept improving while cross-border payments stayed stuck, which became the founding insight behind Caliza five years ago.

* Caliza started as a traditional payments company, and the model has always been to marry stablecoin rails with traditional banking infrastructure rather than replace it.

* After the 2023 banking crisis, Caliza decided to build its own licenses and banking partnerships rather than rely on intermediaries.

* The company has grown consistently above 40% month over month, with 60% growth last month.

* Customers range from customs and FX brokers without engineering teams to global API clients like Flutterwave, Skydo, and LianLian.

* Kebrab pushes back on framing stablecoin players as “the Swift killer.” Swift has built strong standardization for supplier payments, and the real differentiation in cross-border isn’t the rail, it’s the workflow: tax codes, payment messaging, and local compliance criteria that determine whether goods clear customs.

* On agentic commerce, Kebrab sees the near-term opportunity in back-office reconciliation, not consumer payments, helping treasury teams abstract away the work of tracking cash across a dozen markets and currencies. He argues

“If you do not have any form of agentic commerce in how you think about building your company, you’re becoming a relic very fast.”

Caliza is expanding further into Africa and building out collections to Asia in the coming months.

I really enjoyed this conversation with Ezra and I hope you do as well. You can connect with him on Linkedin

Have a great weekend everyone,

-AWS

Recent Episodes

Hi everyone!

Robson Silva is Co-Founder of Pods.

He joins the show to discuss how DeFi’s lack of traction with retail pushed Pods toward building modular yield infrastructure for Latin America’s neobanks.

The conversation was recorded live at the TokenNation event in São Paulo.

It lands at a moment when neobanks and traditional banks alike are racing to bolt yield products onto their stacks without retrofitting their core infrastructure.

Silva trained as a naval engineer before finding crypto in 2017, then spent a year in Singapore working on early AMM research during the ICO era.

He returned to Brazil and co-founded Pods as a DeFi options protocol, building toward almost $10 million in TVL without ever launching a token.

Along the way, Pods also ran a zero-knowledge privacy pilot for Brazil’s CBDC, tokenized construction debt with the registry notary Núclea, and tokenized Brazilian government bonds with Mercado Bitcoin.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

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Key takeways from the conversation:

* Pods spent two and a half years building a DeFi options protocol before realizing retail flows weren’t coming through MetaMask.

* The team built a zero-knowledge privacy pilot for Brazil’s central bank digital currency project, working alongside competing approaches from Microsoft and EY.

* Programmable privacy for composable DeFi remains unsolved. Silva argues AMMs may need to be rebuilt from scratch rather than patched with a privacy layer on top.

* Pods pivoted to B2B, letting neobanks plug into insured, cross-chain yield vaults through an API instead of building that infrastructure themselves.

* Crypto wallet Picnic moved more than 10% of its idle-asset user base into a Pods-powered savings account within 10 days of launch.

* Pods’ cross-chain USDC-to-BRLA product is now running close to $2 million in monthly volume in Brazil.

I enjoyed this wide-ranging conversation with Rob and I hope you do as well.

You can connect with him on Linkedin

Have a great weekend, everyone

-AWS

Recent Episodes

Hey everyone!

Jack Chong is co-founder and CEO of Checker, a stablecoin liquidity network connecting FX banks, payments companies, and neobanks across emerging markets.

He joins the show to discuss why the global financial system still runs on duct tape and stitched together solutions, and how Checker is building the connective tissue to fix it.

Chong grew up in Hong Kong, studied at Oxford, learned Arabic in Jordan while pursuing a career in diplomacy, and eventually landed in New York building stablecoin infrastructure.

His path is unusual, and it shapes how Checker operates: local relationships, local capital, local market structure, with a global product underneath. This is a super interesting project, and, in my view, is one of the missing pieces of infrastructure needed to fulfill the promise of stablecoins as the new medium for global money movement.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Key Takeaways

* The stablecoin fragmentation problem is more serious than it looks. USDT and USDC promise universality, but every market trades, converts, and accounts for them differently. Checker sits in the middle and makes that complexity invisible for the financial institutions that need to move money across borders.

* Checker runs a two-sided network. FX banks, B2B payments companies, and neobanks sit on the demand side. OTC desks and FX brokers handling local fiat conversions sit on the supply side. Over time, customers become providers in other regions, turning the network into a flywheel.

* Twelve months after launching in mid-2025, Checker has processed over $3 billion in payment volume and now accounts for roughly 1% of global B2B stablecoin flows.

* The Brazil-China corridor is one of the most active and most underserved trade routes in the world. China is among Brazil’s top FDI sources and trading partners, yet most of the money movement still runs through informal brokers. VASP regulation and stablecoins are the path to formalizing it.

* Brazil’s VASP framework is expected to be fully in place by Q4 this year. Chong sees a land grab coming: FX brokers, wealth managers, fintechs, and payments companies will all need stablecoin infrastructure fast.

* The BRL carry trade will move on-chain. Wall Street macro funds have long been drawn to Brazilian treasury bond yields. Chong thinks stablecoins are the conduit that opens that trade to crypto natives and retail investors.

You can connect with Jack on Linkedin

I really enjoyed this conversation with Jack, and I hope you do as well.

Have a great week everyone!

- AWS

Recent Episodes

Ola pessoal!

For this week’s episode of Bits and Borders, I’m joined by veteran financial journalist and former CoinDesk colleague David Z. Morris.

David is the author of Stealing the Future, a post-trial account of the FTX collapse and the effective altruism ideology behind it.

He covered the Sam Bankman-Fried criminal trial for Protos and had a front-row seat to the collapse. His reporting at CoinDesk helped surface the leaked balance sheet that triggered the unraveling.

His book is the only comprehensive account of the case built on trial testimony, making it more authoritative than other SBF books that preceded it, such as the works by Michael Lewis and Brady Dale.

Notably, David goes beyond discussing what SBF did and didn’t do wrong and explores in-depth the effective altruism ideology that shaped Sam’s thinking and worldview.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

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Here are the key points from our conversation:

* Effective altruism didn’t just influence SPF: it gave him an ethical framework that explicitly justified stealing customer funds, because utilitarian ends-justify-the-means logic overrode rules like “don’t lie” and “don’t steal.”

* Michael Lewis’ book about SBF is not just wrong, Morris argues - it functionally operates as part of the cover-up, reflecting how thoroughly Lewis was captured by the social world around FTX.

* The “SBF truther” movement is partly organic (bag-holders in denial) and partly, Morris argues, a coordinated disinformation campaign run by SBF’s parents, Joe Bankman and Barbara Fried.

* Morris addresses rumors of “Deep State” or intelligence community involvement in FTX as a speculative claim worthy of further examination. He notes that Sullivan Cromwell, the law firm that ran the FTX bankruptcy, has a long documented relationship with the CIA, and SBF himself accused them of feeding evidence to prosecutors during his trial.

* Effective altruism has rebranded since the FTX collapse - the same ideas now circulate under labels like “abundance” and “effective accelerationism,” pushed by many of the same people.

* Morris portray’s SBF’s ex-girlfriend Caroline Ellison sympathetically: a devout Catholic who lost her faith and let effective altruism fill the void, only to be manipulated by SBF through both romantic and ideological leverage.

This was a super interesting conversation with David about a painful moment in our industry’s history and its consequences, along with the underlying worldview that led to this outcome.

I highly recommend reading David’s book if you want to better understand how these of effective altruism and “accelerationism” are influencing the current debate in tech.

You should also subscribe to David’s Dark Markets publication on Substack where he’s been putting out a lot of banger articles about many of the questionable characters in our industry.

You can also follow David on Linkedin and X/Twitter

👋 Have a great week everyone!

-AWS

Recent Episodes

This episode marks the first under our new name. Brazil Crypto Report is now Bits and Borders.

The rebrand reflects where the conversation has gone. Crypto in Brazil has matured. The regulatory framework is in place, the big banks are in, the infrastructure works. That’s a good thing, but it also means the story has gotten less interesting to tell on repeat.

We’ve been thinking about this move for a while. Bits and Borders lets us go wider, covering a wider canvas of frontier tech in frontier markets. We’ll still talk blockchain when it matters, but we can also chase AI, tokenized credit, fintech, and whatever else is worth your time.

Same show, same perspective, just a bigger aperture.

Thanks to everyone who’s been with us through nearly 200 editions of BCR. We’re excited about what’s ahead!

Our first episode is with Luiz Octavio Gonçalves Neto, who is the founder and CEO of DUX, a company building financial infrastructure for the creative economy in Brazil.

He joins discuss how DUX is using invoice factoring and blockchain-based liquidity to serve a $2.5 trillion global sector that traditional banks have largely ignored.

DUX sits at the intersection of private credit and tokenization, buying receivables from creative economy companies, marketing agencies, event producers, music and film studios, creator agencies, and paying them upfront so they don’t have to wait 90 days for brands like Coca-Cola or Heineken to settle invoices.

The company has done R$182 million in volume and is targeting R$1 billion by year-end.

* DUX’s credit risk sits with the big brand obligors (Coca-Cola, Heineken, Unilever), not with the creative companies themselves. A three-layer security structure, including escrow accounts and co-obligor requirements, protects every operation.

* The creative economy is badly underserved by traditional banks because of the sheer variety of contract types, service structures, and payment flows. Banks haven’t built the internal capacity to underwrite these deals at speed.

* DUX charges an average 3.7% monthly discount rate and its clients, who average 40-60% net margins, find that trade-off worthwhile because it frees cash flow to run multiple projects simultaneously instead of one or two.

* The Decentral (app.usedecentral.com) is DUX’s Web3 liquidity arm, allowing global investors to deploy stablecoins into the operation at 18% APY. It currently accounts for about 15% of total liquidity, with the rest coming from a Brazilian credit fund and a $20 million debt structure.

* Blockchain isn’t DUX’s primary capital source anymore, but it serves as an anti-fragile backup. If traditional lenders pull back, Web3 liquidity is there. If crypto dries up, bank relationships cover it. The diversification is the point.

* 90% of DUX’s client base has referred at least one new customer, and 75-80% come back monthly for repeat transactions.

DUX is also launching a neobank this year and planning a rebrand, with five or six new financial products in development. Listen to the full conversation for the complete breakdown.

I hope you enjoyed this conversation with Luiz as much as I did.

You can connect with Luiz on Linkedin

If you’re interested in becoming a DUX liquidity provider, you can do so via the Decentral platform

👋 Have a great week everyone!

-AWS

Recent Episodes

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Ola pessoal!

I had the chance to catch up with Sthefano Batista at Merge Sao Paulo. Sthefano is Head of Latam at Figment, which is the world’s largest provider of institutional staking services with more than $18 billion in assets staked.

Figment counts BlackRock, Nubank, and Robinhood among its clients, and is responsible for 5 to 6 percent of all Ethereum validated globally.

Why Institutions Are Embracing Staking

For traditional finance, digital asset staking is a genuinely new concept. It is not a bond. It is not a dividend. The yield comes from supporting the network itself, and the risk profile is fundamentally different from anything in a legacy portfolio.

What has resonated with institutional clients, Sthefano explains, is precisely that difference. Staking on a network like Solana or Ethereum, done correctly through a non-custodial provider, means client assets never leave their wallets. Figment never touches private keys. If Figment disappeared tomorrow, clients would still have their assets.

That can be a hard pitch to make to compliance teams. But once it lands, it tends to land well.

The Edge Is in the Details

Figment’s positioning is not built on offering the highest yields. It is built on risk-adjusted performance, and that distinction matters.

The firm has a dedicated protocol team that vets every network before onboarding it, monitors governance and inflationary changes, and helps institutional clients understand what updates like Solana’s FireDancer mean in practice. They have never had a slashing event in their history. When you are validating 5 percent of all Ethereum, you do not take shortcuts.

Brazil as a Test Case for Regulated Staking

Brazil’s updated VASP framework, revised last November, has created one of the clearest regulatory environments for staking anywhere in the world. For Figment, that has been a genuine business accelerant, giving Faria Lima institutions the confidence to move from curiosity to commitment.

Sthefano frames it well: the blockchain is global, but how Brazil thinks about investment risk, inflation, and wealth protection is distinctly local. You need people on the ground who understand both.

Key Takeaways

* Figment manages $18B in staked assets and validates 5 to 6% of all Ethereum

* Non-custodial staking means client assets are never held by Figment

* Brazil’s VASP regulation has created a clear, compliant path for institutional staking

* BlackRock and Nubank are among Figment’s publicly confirmed clients

* Figment just launched a USDC yield product and is expanding across the Americas

Recent Episodes

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Ola pessoal!

At Merge São Paulo, I caught up with Rodrigo Coelho, CEO of Edge & Node, which is the original team behind The Graph protocol.

We talked about one of the most exciting intersections in tech right now: agentic commerce and the future of blockchain-powered payments.

Rodrigo was born in Brazil, and his family moved to the US when he was young.

His path into Web3 started the way a lot of great origin stories do, by accident. Working out of a San Francisco co-working space in 2016, he struck up a friendship with Yaniv Tal, who was building the pitch deck for what would become The Graph.

A few years later, Rodrigo was the team’s first hire. He has been with them ever since, taking over as CEO just over a year ago.

For the uninitiated, The Graph is the indexing and querying layer that sits beneath much of Web3. If you have ever interacted with a decentralized application, you have almost certainly used it without knowing it.

Edge & Node recently launched AMP, a new product that modernizes that infrastructure for institutional use. It offers cryptographic data verification, cross-chain compatibility, and a predictable flat-fee pricing model that banks and financial institutions are finding increasingly attractive as their API costs spiral.

The part of our conversation that really stood out was the discussion around agentic commerce.

As AI agents become capable of executing real-world tasks autonomously, they need a way to pay for things. A rational agent is not going to choose a payment rail that charges a 3% fee and requires KYC when it could settle a transaction for a thousandth of a cent using stablecoins. That calculus is not even close.

Edge & Node has been working on micro-payment infrastructure since 2021. When Coinbase’s X402 standard launched, they jumped on it immediately, contributing a deferred payment scheme that allows nano-payments to be batched and settled on-chain in bulk.

It is exactly the kind of boring-but-essential plumbing that makes a new financial system actually work.

We also got into the competitive landscape, whether Visa and MasterCard can reinvent themselves before crypto rails make their fee extraction model obsolete, and why the stablecoin wars may not produce a single winner.

Key Takeaways:

* The Graph quietly powers much of Web3 data infrastructure, and Edge & Node’s new product AMP brings that technology to institutional players with compliance and cost predictability built in

* AI agents will gravitate toward crypto payment rails naturally since they cannot easily KYC, and the fee difference vs. traditional rails is not even a contest

* Ephemeral virtual cards are a short-term bridge for agentic commerce, but agent-to-agent crypto payments are where things are heading fast

* The stablecoin landscape is unlikely to produce one winner; expect a fragmented but interoperable ecosystem, much like traditional banking today

* Visa and MasterCard are paying close attention, but their 3% fee model faces a serious structural threat as X402-style rails go mainstream

Give it a listen!

Have a great week everyone,

-AWS

Brazil Crypto Report is presented by

Figment is the leading independent provider of staking infrastructure with $18B assets under stake and provides the complete solution for over 1000 institutional clients in Latin America and globally. Through its enterprise-grade infrastructure, Figment enables clients such as banks and exchanges, to earn rewards on Proof-of-Stake assets such as Ethereum and Solana, while maintaining the highest standards of security, compliance, and performance.

Recent Episodes

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Ola pessoal!

If you want to understand where the blockchain talent market is heading, talk to a recruiter. They’re always six months ahead of the news cycle.

Owen Healy of Owen Healy Blockchain Talent proves the rule.

The Ireland-based blockchain headhunter has spent five years placing developers, BD professionals, DevRels, and marketers at some of the most promising projects in the space.

With 50,000 LinkedIn followers and a track record of successfully placing Brazilian talent at global crypto firms, Owen brings a ground-level perspective on where the industry is hiring, who it’s hiring, and why Brazil keeps coming up as one of the most exciting talent pools in the world.

BCR is excited to be a media partner for Merge Sao Paulo next week. Shoot me a note if you’re going to be around want to catch up!

Key takeaways from the episode:

* The blockchain job market is growing up. The early days of hiring only developers and BD folks are over. Product managers, legal professionals, and candidates with traditional finance backgrounds are now in high demand as crypto projects move from experimentation into operational maturity.

* TradFi talent is finally making the jump. Wall Street professionals who were curious about crypto but reluctant to give up salary and benefits are finding it easier to transition now — as more institutional-grade firms enter the space and offer risk profiles that actually suit them.

* Brazilian talent punches above its weight. Owen consistently highlights Brazilian candidates for their strong engineering skills, clear communication, honesty about their experience, and competitive rates relative to North American counterparts - all while working in compatible time zones.

* Remote work is getting harder to secure. Time zones matter more than they did in 2021, and hybrid models are increasingly common. The candidates who remain location-independent are those whose skills are rare enough that companies will bend the rules to hire them.

* Job boards alone won’t cut it. Owen’s advice for job seekers: go “multi-chain.” Apply through official channels, but also build genuine relationships inside target companies, get internal advocates, and come to interviews prepared with competitive intelligence.

* Referrals still rule. In a small industry where everyone is a second-degree connection from everyone else, a warm introduction remains the single most powerful job search tool.

Have a great week everyone,

-AWS

Brazil Crypto Report is presented by

Figment is the leading independent provider of staking infrastructure with $18B assets under stake and provides the complete solution for over 1000 institutional clients in Latin America and globally. Through its enterprise-grade infrastructure, Figment enables clients such as banks and exchanges, to earn rewards on Proof-of-Stake assets such as Ethereum and Solana, while maintaining the highest standards of security, compliance, and performance.

Recent Episodes