Rafael Luz and Bernardo Brites are co-founders of Trace Finance, a Brazilian cross-border payments infrastructure company. They join host Aaron Stanley at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss the company's $32 million Series A and the launch of a BRL-backed stablecoin.

The company recently raised a $32 million round led by CoinFund, with Coinbase Ventures, Jump, Paxos, and others.

Trace is launching what it expects to be the largest BRL-backed stablecoin, aimed at giving global companies access to Brazilian real for the first time without running into Brazil's capital controls.

You can connect with Bernardo and Rafael on Linkedin

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Bits and 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.

Read the full report here:

Ezra Kebrab is co-founder of Caliza.

He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss cross-border stablecoin payments in Latin America.

Recorded live at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City.

Caliza handles cross-border supplier and treasury payments, with most volume flowing between Brazil, Mexico, China, Hong Kong, and the US.

Kebrab traces his path from Visa, where he watched Pix transform real-time payments in Brazil, to founding Caliza five years ago on a stablecoin-first model built on top of traditional banking infrastructure.

He explains why Caliza has grown 40-60% month over month, why he doesn't view stablecoin rails as a replacement for Swift, and why workflow and local compliance knowledge are what actually win customer trust.

He also shares his read on agentic commerce, where he sees the near-term opportunity in back-office reconciliation rather than consumer payments.

Caliza is expanding into Africa and Asia in the coming months.

You can connect with Ezra on Linkedin

Robson Silva Junior is Co-Founder of Pods.

He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss how DeFi's mixed retail adoption led Pods to build modular yield infrastructure for Latin America's neobanks.

Recorded live at the Token Nation event in São Paulo, the conversation traces Silva's path from naval engineering to early AMM research during Singapore's ICO era.

Silva explains why Pods abandoned its B2C options protocol once it became clear retail users weren't going to interact with MetaMask directly.

He also discusses Pods' work building a zero-knowledge privacy pilot for Brazil's central bank digital currency, and why programmable privacy for composable DeFi remains unsolved.

The episode closes on how neobanks now use Pods' API to offer insured, cross-chain yield without building that infrastructure in-house.

You can connect with Rob on Linkedin