Bits and Borders

Aaron Stanley
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From digital assets to tokenization to artificial intelligence, Bits and Borders explores the growth of frontier technology in frontier markets

  1. 1 day ago

    #190: The Coming Neobank Shakeout? with Olivia Vande Woude of Ava Labs

    Olivia Vande Woude is Tokenization Lead at Ava Labs. She joins host Aaron Stanley at Bitso's Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss why distribution, not issuance, is the hardest problem left to solve in tokenized real world assets. We talk through Open Trade's B2B2C stablecoin yield model gaining traction across LATAM and APAC, a coming wave of consolidation among crypto neobanks and card issuers, and why real utility metrics matter more than vanity numbers You can connect with Olivia on Linkedin Subscribe to Bits and Borders on Substack ------------------------------------------------- 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: ⁠

  2. 17 Jul

    #189: El Dorado CEO Guillermo Goncalves Live from Bitso Stablecoin Conference

    Guillermo Goncalvez is CEO of El Dorado. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Bitso's Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss El Dorado's new $9 million Series A round, led by Paradigm with Coinbase Ventures participating. Goncalvez explains how El Dorado is taking the liquidity network it built serving over a million consumers across Latin America and redeploying it for a new B2B product aimed at import and export businesses. They also talk about the wave of foreign investor interest opening up in Venezuela. You can connect with Guillermo Goncalvez on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillermogoncalvez/ 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: https://sumsub.com/crypto-industry-report-2026/?utm_source=promenade&utm_medium=media&utm_campaign=crypto-report_report_2026

  3. 12 Jul

    #188: Inside Trace Finance's $32M Series A Raise

    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 ------------------------------------------------------- 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:

  4. 26 Jun

    #187: He Left Visa to Build Caliza with Ezra Kebrab; Live from Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City

    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

  5. 19 Jun

    #186: Unbundling the SuperApp with Robson Silva of Pods

    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

  6. 10 Jun

    #185: Unlocking Stablecoin Liquidity with Checker CEO Jack Chong

    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.

  7. 5 Jun

    #184: David Z. Morris on SBF and the Collapse of Effective Altruism

    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.

  8. 26 May

    #183: Tokenized Credit for Brazil's Creative Economy with DUX

    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. ----------------------------------------------------------------- 🎙Listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Spotify⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Apple Podcasts⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Google⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ 💣 For editorial and sponsorship inquiries: aaron@promenadeadvisory.com #brazil #web3 #crypto #blockchain #bitcoin #ethereum #fintech #latam #defi #onchain #regulation #cryptonews #stablecoins #tokenization #RWAs

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About

From digital assets to tokenization to artificial intelligence, Bits and Borders explores the growth of frontier technology in frontier markets

Information

  • Creator
    Aaron Stanley
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    197
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Aaron Stanley
  • Show Website
    Bits and Borders