Bits and Borders

Robert Materazzi is CEO of Lukka, which is a unicorn crypto data services company valued at US$1.3 billion. After starting as “Turbotax for Crypto” product 10 years ago that helped retail crypto holders figure out their tax obligations, Lukka has built itself into a unicorn enterprise crypto data services company offering institutional-grade accounting, audit and data products. In this conversatio...

This episode recaps the top stories in the Brazil crypto market from Sept 11-15, 2023 Articles discussed here include: - "Binance says it is a “victim” of pyramids; CPI wants a list of the brokerage’s 700 biggest clients" via Portal do Bitcoin - "Coinbase to push for ‘global consensus’ on crypto rules through G20 in Brazil" via The Block - "Brazil has fallen in the global...

Daniel Lynch is head of Metamask Institutional partnerships at Consensys and also looks after sales and business development for Brazil and Latam. In this episode, we discuss the results of a recent survey conducted by Consensys exploring Brazilians' attitudes towards Web3, and adoption for both Metamask and Metamask Institutional in Brazil ------------- Be sure to take a look at Consensys&#39...

Marcos Viriato is CEO of Parfin, a leading Web3 and blockchain infrastructure firm in Latin America. A former partner at BTG Pactual, Marcos believes that mass institutional adoption of crypto and blockchain-based assets will need to occur on permissioned networks and solutions. With its Parfin Terminal, tokenization, and MPC and crypto-as-a-service offerings, Parfin is providing this infrastructu...

AWS and Antonio dissect the week's biggest stories from the Brazil crypto universe. Stories in this week's episode include: - Central Bank announces that the rollout of crypto regulations will be delayed until the first half of 2024 - First Drex testnet transaction executed ; onboarding woes continue - Hashdex enters the US bitcoin ETF race with clever backdoor maneuver - CVM (Brazil's...

Maria Gabriela Damiani is a Technical Advisor to the President at the Commissão dos Valores Imobiliários (CVM), also known as the Brazilian version of the SEC. In this episode we discuss the CVM's approach to digital asset regulation and how it differs from the approaches take by other countries. We also dive into some thorny discussion topics such as the line between investor protection and c...

Mayra Siqueira is the Brazil community manager for the Algorand Foundation. In this episode we discuss Mayra's trajectory from journalism, to being Binance's first employee in Brazil and then ultimately to working on Algorand - a Layer 1 blockchain developed by renowned computer scientist and Turing Award winner Silvio Micali We discuss the variety of use cases and applications being built...

On this edition of the BCR Weekly Recap, AWS and co-host Antonio Neto look at the week's big stories, including: the Brazilian Central Bank's surprise announcements that it will suspend its Lift Lab accelerator program and delay the first phase of its Digital Real (Drex) pilot by three months Binance's launch of Binance Pay in Brazil and cancelation of its debit card partnership with M...

Bruno Ramos de Sousa is head of US and Europe at Hashdex, one of the largest crypto asset managers in the world that offers ETFs and other exchange traded products in several markets. Contrary to the prevailing market narrative that a bitcoin ETF approval in the US is imminent, Bruno argues that landscape in the US has not fundamentally changed despite recent filings by Blackrock and other large T...

Nicky Dyskant is one of the top fintech and capital markets lawyers in Brazil. In this conversation we discuss her role as an advisor to several key crypto companies operating in the country - including Fireblocks, 2TM, Vórtx QR Tokenizadora and Hashdex. We dive into her purview on Drex (formerly Digital Real), the crypto regulatory framework currently being developed by the Brazilian Central Bank...

Leandro Pereira is head of growth for Latam at Paysafe and a 10 year veteran of the Brazil crypto scene. We discuss Leandro’s trajectory in the ecosystem and Paysafe's payments infrastructure in the region, which includes a digital wallet, debit and credit card products and APIs for connecting alternative payment methods. Paysafe's crypto payments stack also provides fiat on and off-ramp s...

Rai Auad is one of the top independent Web3 educators and content creators in Brazil. In this episode we talk about how Rai got her start in crypto via Axie Infinity and other crypto games in 2021 before quitting her job at Itaú to become a full-time content creator in the space. We discuss how she engages her audience across different platforms and channels, as well as the ups and downs of being...

Gean Chu is a partner at Honey Island Capital, a Curitiba-based venture firm founded by veterans of Ebanx. In this conversation we discuss Honey Island's fintech investment theses and Gean's new Web3 fund focused on liquid tokens and on-chain strategies like staking, farming and liquidity provision You can connect with Gean on Linkedin and Twitter Connect with Brazil Crypto Report across t...

It's been a rough few months for the crypto custody world. Ledger sparked a backlash with a controversial key recovery proposal, regulated custodian Prime Trust was put into receivership by the state of Nevada following allegations it misused customer funds, and Nasdaq backed away from plans to launch its own crypto custody service. Composecure CPO Adam Lowe joins the show to discuss the crypt...

This week’s podcast is a recording of a panel I hosted with Thales Freitas of Bitso , AB InBev’s Daniel Tartaro and fintech expert Bruno Diniz at Digital Finance Brasil last month at the University of São Paulo. The panel explored how the respective worlds of crypto and fintech in Brazil are quickly converging, be it through Bitso’s efforts to bridge traditional finance with DeFi and CeFi, AB InBe...

Renan Kruger is a digital asset specialist at Santander Brasil, one of Brazil's largest banks and one that is actively involved in the country's budding digital asset space. This episode was recorded live at Digital Finance Brasil on June 22 at the University of São Paulo. We discuss: how Santander Brasil is studying the digital asset market and regulatory ecosystem in the country the bank...

Rodrix Digital is one of Brazil’s original crypto influencers and content creators having first started his YouTube brand back in 2017. He now provides education and content on various platforms, including YouTube, LinkedIn, and TikTok, and has expanded his services to include consulting, marketing, and PR for businesses entering the Brazilian market. Today, his Bitcoin Block YouTube channel has p...

For this episode I am joined by Cryptum CEO André Salem to discuss illuminating new research exploring crypto adoption and sentiment in Brazil that him and his team have produced. Cryptum is a Brazil-based blockchain-as-a-service stack that provides tools for developers and companies looking to build blockchain and Web3 applications. André and his team recently commissioned an extensive survey of...

Like it or not, the US is still the most important crypto market in the world, and if you’re a professional operating in this industry you need to be paying serious attention to what’s happening there. So to help you do that, Antonio and I invited two experts from the US to help us synthesize what’s going on with these SEC lawsuits and understand how observers in markets like Brazil should be inte...

I had the chance to catch up with Guilherme Santana at Consensus 2023 in Austin. Guilherme is an engineer, biotech entrepreneur, crypto OG and the founder of Preservaland, which is a project that uses NFTs to incentivize landowners to protect their holdings from deforestation. We talk about how the Preservaland team identifies land in Brazil that is considered “preservable” and then pay the landow...

Nesse podcast gravado live no Criptorama Brasilia dia 7 de Junho, eu converso com Juliana Walenkamp do BitGo sobre a importância do custôdia na questão do regulaçåo do criptomoedas Juliana Walenkamp é chefe de vendas institucionais da Latam na BitGo no Brasil e passou um tempo representando outros nomes familiares da Web3 como Ripple, Gemini e Transfero na região. Nesta conversa, mergulhamos na ev...

Jonathan Levin is Co-Founder and Chief Strategy Officer at Chainalysis, a leading blockchain data and analytics company valued at US$8.6 billion in its most recent funding round. I had the chance to sit down with Jonathan this week at the Criptorama conference in Brasilia, hosted by ABCripto and Fenasbac. We met up in the lobby of the famous Royal Tulip Hotel to chat about how blockchain data serv...

For this episode I'm joined by Alex Nascimento, who is a professor at UCLA in the US and a partner at 7 Visions Digital, a São Paulo-based venture fund focused on tokenizing Real World Assets such as debt, precatories and environmental assets. He’s also the author of The STO Financial Revolution: How Security Tokens Change Businesses Forever. I was also joined by Antonio Neto as a guest co-hos...

For this most recent podcast I had the chance to sit down with Jorge Souto and Paulo Boghosian who run the TC Cripto program at Traders Club. Traders Club is a premium community that provides education, tools and research for primarily sophisticated traders across equities, derivatives and commodities. Paulo and Jorge are both career TradFi professionals who pivoted into crypto in the mid-2010s. I...

Andre Portilho is head of digital assets at BTG Pactual, which is one of the largest banks in Brazil and the largest investment bank in Latin America. He previously ran the options desk at BTG when bitcoin came onto his radar in 2017. Since then, BTG has been a leader among financial institutions globally in embracing and utilizing blockchain technology as well as offering crypto products to its c...