Brazil Crypto Report
News, analysis and interviews exploring the Brazilian crypto market bitsborders.substack.com
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Episode #191: Crossing the Stablecoin Adoption Chasm: Live from Bitso Stablecoin Conference 2026
<p>Hey everyone,</p><p>This podcast is a live panel I hosted at the Bitso Business Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City in June. This session focused specifically on identifying and solving the practical roadblocks to stablecoin adoption, both on the payments and issuance side.</p><p>Joining me for this session are:</p><p>* Joao Reginatto, Chief Strategy Officer at M0</p><p>* Monica Ramirez, Managing Director at Anchorage Digital</p><p>* Olivia Vande Woude, Tokenization Lead at Ava Labs</p><p>* Sheraz Shere, GM for Payments and Commerce at Solana Foundation. I</p><p>Our panel dug into...
Episode #190: The Coming Neobank Shakeout? with Olivia Vande Woude of Ava Labs
<p>Hey everyone,</p><p>Olivia Vande Woude is Tokenization Lead at Ava Labs. I caught up with her at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City in June to discuss the distribution challenge facing tokenized real world assets.</p><p>Issuance has become commoditized, and the real fight now is over distribution. Olivia argues that most tokenized assets have targeted crypto native users, a limited addressable market compared to plugging into existing financial pipes.</p><p>🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts</p><p>🔥 Join our English language Telegram group...
Episode #189: El Dorado CEO Guillermo Goncalves Live from Bitso's Stablecoin Conference
<p>Hey everyone,</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>The raise also lands as Goncalvez, who is Venezuelan, sees renewed international investor interest in Venezuela’s financial sector after ye...
Episode #188: Inside Trace Finance's $32M Series A Raise
<p>Hey everyone,</p><p>Bernardo Brites and Rafael Luz are co-founders of Trace Finance, a Brazilian cross-border payments infrastructure company. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p...
#187: He Left Visa to Build Caliza with Ezra Kebrab
<p>Hey everyone! </p><p>I caught up with Caliza CEO Ezra Kebrab at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City earlier this month. </p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platf...
Episode #186: Unbundling the SuperApp with Pods CTO Robson Silva
<p>Hi everyone!</p><p>Robson Silva is Co-Founder of Pods.</p><p>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.</p><p>The conversation was recorded live at the TokenNation event in São Paulo.</p><p>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.</p><p>Silva trained as a naval engineer before finding crypto in 2017, then spent a year in Singapore working on ea...
Episode #185: Unlocking Stablecoin Liquidity with Checker CEO Jack Chong
<p>Hey everyone! </p><p>Jack Chong is co-founder and CEO of Checker, a stablecoin liquidity network connecting FX banks, payments companies, and neobanks across emerging markets.</p><p>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.</p><p>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.</p><p>His path is unusual, and it shapes how...
Episode #184: David Z. Morris on Effective Altruism and the Inner Workings of Sam Bankman-Fried
<p>Ola pessoal! </p><p>For this week’s episode of Bits and Borders, I’m joined by veteran financial journalist and former CoinDesk colleague David Z. Morris.</p><p>David is the author of Stealing the Future, a post-trial account of the FTX collapse and the effective altruism ideology behind it. </p><p>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.</p><p>His book is the only comprehensive account of the case built on trial test...
Episode #183: Tokenized Credit for Brazil's Creative Economy with DUX
<p>This episode marks the first under our new name. Brazil Crypto Report is now Bits and Borders.</p><p>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.</p><p>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 i...
Episode #182: Live from Merge Sao Paulo: Staking Goes Global with Figment's Sthefano Batista
<p>🙌 You can listen to BCR on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts</p><p>🔥 Join the BCR English language Telegram group to continue the conversation</p><p>Ola pessoal! </p><p>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. </p><p>Figment counts BlackRock, Nubank, and Robinhood among its clients, and is responsible for 5 to 6 percent of all Ethereum validated globally. </p><p>Why Institutions Are Embracin...
