Trace CEO: We Built A $10B Volume Stablecoin Company (How We Did It)

**Robbie** (0:00)
Yo, yo, yo, welcome back to episode number 37 of Stabled Up, our premier weekly Stablecoin show powered by our friends at Frax. Visit frax.com, learn more about their FRX, USD products and more. Today we've got Bernardo Brites, a CEO of Trace Finance, a fintech platform enabling fast cross border payments and stable coin infra for companies in Brazil and LatAm abroad. Before launching Trace in 2020, he ran a successful crypto trading desk in Brazil, sourcing major Bitcoin volumes for local exchanges and held early roles at other blockchain projects. A graduate of a top university in Rio, a party town that we like to be at. Bernardo, good to have you, man.

**Bernardo Brites** (0:40)
Likewise. I actually dropped out, but yes.

**Robbie** (0:44)
I also dropped out. So, well, congratulations on the race, and let's set the stage here, man. So this kind of proliferation of stable coins has predominantly been, you know, in the US, the growth of Tether Circle and a lot of this kind of expanding the US dollar hegemony and really kind of growing that.
But the use cases abroad seemingly are the most impactful for a day-to-day person. Give us the kind of rundown of how you started Trace, kind of what the core vision here is, and just kind of like your view on how stable coins are going to proliferate and eat finance.

**Bernardo Brites** (1:27)
I have been in crypto for 10 years now, and it's really interesting to see how the cycles change and what the industry puts more weight into and by extension value rates. So on the stable coin side, I think that it's really an amazing time because before you had tokens appreciating and the interest in blockchain and crypto were a product of people getting money, essentially, because the token price was getting up. And that applies to memes, that applies to any different token that has speculation into it.
People, companies, corporations are not going to stop using stable coins because the stock price of circles down or because any specific protocol token is down. So if there's a specific company that is adopting USET and other stable coins because it's faster, cheaper, better to use it in a specific corridor, they're going to keep using it regardless of the Bitcoin or the Token price. But in my opinion, the adoption of stable coins and the adoption of blockchain in general actually feeds back into Eturing having value, Solana having value, and even Bitcoin now with some layer to projects, like LightSpark and Lightning Network as well, Lightning Labs, processing a bunch of stable coins on top of Bitcoin as well now. So I do think that it's an amazing time to be alive. It's an even better time to be leading a stable coin company. And I do think that it's just a start. We are seeing huge companies now having interest in stable coins and in using crypto in payments. So it's really an amazing...
Amazing results in what I have seen over the years.

**Robbie** (3:35)
Yeah, man. I mean, the proliferation and the growth of USDT and USDC has been remarkable. And so I'm just curious, like, let's get into like the nitty gritty, into the niche of Brazil and LatAm and why stable coins are growing so much there. You know, obviously we know about PICS, the primary payment method in Brazil.
How do you anticipate capturing a lot of this market share in Brazil with Trace for cross border payments and payments at large? Maybe just give us your view of the flaws in the payment systems in Brazil or in LatAm, specifically like the problem that you find to be solved with stable coins down there. You know, given your unique upbringing there as well as your understanding of the financial system in Brazil and LatAm.
What is the core of the issue and of the opportunity here?

**Bernardo Brites** (4:27)
So PICS is amazing.
It's free 24-7 instance payment system, right? So that actually enabled a bunch of different industries, even I would say like exchanges, to thrive in Brazil. Because now you can actually receive deposits and process withdrawals real time. So that is really, really good for the domestic markets. And it has really enabled a bunch of industries that in other markets are not as successful because you have to use like car networks to get into. And now you can actually move high volume into a very low cost transaction, this case free, right, for users and instance.
So in that specific case, I don't think that you would use data or even a local BRL stable coin to now process local transactions. Having said that, where I really think stable coins can add a lot of value in Brazil is actually on the cross border piece of it. So Brazil is one of the only top 20 economies in the world that has a currency that can't be settled outside of Brazil, outside of that country, and we also can't hold foreign currency onshore either. So you can't have dollar accounts in Brazil. You can have dollar accounts that are held by a foreign bank elsewhere and so on, but it's a proxy, so you can't really do that natively in the nation. So by us actually enabling a BRL stable coin, we could actually now enable a connection, a bridge between the liquidity of the domestic markets and stutter, for example. That otherwise, you would have to settle BRL into USD, wait one to two days for SWIFT, and then you would acquire that USDT. You wouldn't be able to do that at scale. So I do think that stable coins in Brazil are very interesting for cross-border payments. Now for other countries in the region, I do see it as an amazing inflation control. So if you want to have easier access to stable coins that you can send to any country, you can actually be a global citizen, live in Argentina, and have your assets in USD stables.