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

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 host Aaron Stanley to discuss why cross-border stablecoin payments are still broken, and how Checker is building the infrastructure layer to fix it.

Chong's path from Hong Kong to Oxford to a language school in Jordan to building stablecoin rails in New York and Latin America is not a straight line, but it explains exactly why Checker is built the way it is: global product, local execution, regional investors with boots on the ground.

In its first 12 months, the network processed over $3 billion in payment volume.

Chong breaks down the Brazil-China corridor, where most cross-border business payments still run through informal brokers, and makes the case for why Brazil's VASP regulation arriving in Q4 is a pivotal moment for any institution that wants to offer stablecoin products.

He also floats an intriguing idea: stablecoins as the conduit that opens the BRL carry trade, long a Wall Street macro favorite, to crypto natives and retail investors.

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

He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss what the criminal trial revealed that earlier books missed, why Michael Lewis's account functionally serves as a defense of the fraud, and how the ideology that shaped Sam Bankman-Fried continues to circulate under new names.

Morris was part of the CoinDesk team that broke the story and later covered the trial for Protos.

Topics include the SBF truther movement, speculative but documented questions about Sullivan & Cromwell's intelligence connections, Caroline Ellison's story, stimulant culture at FTX, and how effective altruism has rebranded as "abundance" and "effective accelerationism."

Morris argues that EA gave SPF an ethical framework that explicitly justified stealing customer funds - and that the same logic is still being sold to engineers in Silicon Valley today.

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

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

DUX buys receivables from creative economy companies, marketing agencies, event producers, music studios, and creator agencies, paying them upfront instead of waiting 90 days for big brands to settle.

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

Luiz covers how its Web3 liquidity platform lets global investors deploy stablecoins into Brazilian private credit, why blockchain serves as an anti-fragile capital backup, and what's next as DUX launches a neobank and prepares a rebrand.

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💣 For editorial and sponsorship inquiries: aaron@promenadeadvisory.com

#brazil #web3 #crypto #blockchain #bitcoin #ethereum #fintech #latam #defi #onchain #regulation #cryptonews #stablecoins #tokenization #RWAs

Sthefano Batista is Head of Latam at Figment, the world's largest institutional provider of staking services with $18 billion in assets staked.

Recorded live at Merge Sao Paulo, Sthefano joins host Aaron Stanley to break down how Figment is building the staking market across Latin America, why major institutions like BlackRock, Nubank, and Robinhood trust Figment with their crypto yield strategies, and what makes Brazil one of the most interesting regulatory environments for staking in the world.

They dig into the nuances of proof-of-stake infrastructure, how Figment protects clients from slashing risk, the difference between retail and institutional staking priorities, and what the recent VASP regulatory updates in Brazil mean for the industry.

You can connect with Sthefano on Linkedin

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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.

Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠figment.io⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

-------------------------------------------------------------------🎙Listen to BCR on your favorite podcast platform

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#brazil #web3 #crypto #blockchain #bitcoin #ethereum #fintech #latam #defi #onchain #regulation #cryptonews #stablecoins #tokenization

Rodrigo Coelho is CEO of Edge & Node. In this episode, recorded live at Merge Sao Paulo, joins host Aaron Stanley to explore the cutting edge of agentic commerce and blockchain data infrastructure.

Rodrigo shares how Edge & Node, the original team behind The Graph protocol - built the indexing layer that quietly powers much of Web3 today, and how their new product, AMP, is modernizing that infrastructure for institutional adoption.

The conversation digs into why crypto rails are uniquely suited for the agentic economy: from micro-payments between AI agents to ephemeral virtual cards bridging the gap for everyday merchants, and why agents paying each other via stablecoins may be closer than we think.

You can connect with Rodrigo on https://www.linkedin.com/in/rodrigoco/

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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.

Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠figment.io⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

-------------------------------------------------------------------🎙Listen to BCR on your favorite podcast platform

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💣 For editorial and sponsorship inquiries: aaron@promenadeadvisory.com

#brazil #web3 #crypto #blockchain #bitcoin #ethereum #fintech #latam #defi #onchain #regulation #cryptonews #stablecoins #tokenization

Owen Healy has spent five years matching blockchain talent with crypto projects around the world - and he's built a 50,000-follower LinkedIn following doing it. In this episode, Aaron sits down with the Ireland-based recruiter to explore how the blockchain talent market actually works: how recruiters get paid, how candidates can trust a headhunter is acting in their interest, and why referrals still beat job boards every time.

Owen shares why Brazilian developers and blockchain professionals are increasingly in demand globally, what skills make candidates hireable regardless of location, and how the remote work pendulum is swinging back toward hybrid models. He also breaks down his "multi-chain" approach to job searching - why one-click LinkedIn applications rarely work, and how building genuine relationships inside target companies is the real edge in today's AI-saturated hiring landscape.

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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.

Learn more at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠figment.io⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

-------------------------------------------------------------------🎙Listen to BCR on your favorite podcast platform

⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

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⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Google⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠

💣 For editorial and sponsorship inquiries: aaron@promenadeadvisory.com

#brazil #web3 #crypto #blockchain #bitcoin #ethereum #fintech #latam #defi #onchain #regulation #cryptonews #stablecoins #tokenization