Bernardo Brites, CEO and Co-Founder of Trace Finance – Interview Series

Bernardo Brites, CEO and Co-Founder of Trace Finance, is a Brazilian entrepreneur and fintech executive with deep experience across cross-border payments, digital assets, and financial infrastructure. He co-founded Trace Finance in 2020 and has led the company as CEO as it has expanded its role in connecting Brazilian real (BRL) payment rails with global financial markets. Before Trace, Brites served as CEO of Lasting Capital, a major Brazilian cryptocurrency trading desk, and held partnership roles at Transfero Swiss AG and Decred, where he worked on exchange listings, institutional relationships, and ecosystem development. He has also advised and written for Portal do Bitcoin, one of Brazil’s prominent blockchain publications, and earlier co-founded Farmaliv, giving him a background spanning entrepreneurship, marketing, partnerships, liquidity, and digital finance.

Trace Finance is a payments and stablecoin infrastructure company focused on helping fintechs, exchanges, and global businesses move money into and out of Brazil and Latin America. Its platform provides BRL, USD, and EUR accounts, stablecoin on- and off-ramps, foreign exchange conversion, and cross-border payments through a unified API, including integration with Brazil’s PIX instant-payment network. Trace says it has processed more than $10 billion in transactions and can convert BRL into stablecoins in under 60 seconds, with infrastructure designed to operate around the clock rather than being constrained by traditional banking hours. The company combines payment rails, liquidity, automated Know Your Customer (KYC) processes, transaction monitoring, and multi-currency settlement to give international companies a way to access Brazilian financial infrastructure without establishing their own local entity.

What market inefficiencies convinced you to build infrastructure rather than another crypto company?

I spent years in the trenches of Brazilian crypto, running one of the first crypto trading desks in the country, working with Decred, advising Portal do Bitcoin. What I kept seeing was the same bottleneck over and over. The crypto layer was getting faster and cheaper every year, but the moment you tried to connect it to the actual financial system, everything slowed back down to bank speed and bank cost. Brazil is one of the only top 20 economies in the world where you can’t settle the local currency outside the country and can’t legally hold dollar accounts onshore. That’s not a crypto problem, that’s a regulatory infrastructure problem. I realized the real opportunity wasn’t building another app on top of that broken plumbing, it was fixing the plumbing itself.

What were the most important lessons scaling to $10B+ in volume?

The biggest lesson is that compliance can’t be a bottleneck if you want to scale. We built our payment systems so that the vast majority of volume flows through without friction. Having the right processes set up before we start with each client allows for this smooth sailing and mitigates the need for intervention later on.  Banks generally aren’t built to think this way because cross-border payments usually aren’t their core focus, they’re focused on borrowing and lending. The second lesson is that regulation has to be approached as a partnership, not an obstacle. We currently operate under our own licenses in the US and Brazil, and through partner banks in Mexico, Colombia, Europe, and Asia. Building those banking relationships market by market, rather than trying to bypass them, is what let us become the main infrastructure provider for the top four global payment providers operating in LatAm.

What does this level of institutional backing signal about the next five years?

It tells you the market has moved past the experimental phase. CoinFund, Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, Paxos, and Chainlink Labs aren’t making speculative bets on a narrative, they’re underwriting infrastructure that’s already processing real institutional volume. Before this round we were a seed-stage company that had raised $4 million and processed $10 billion in payment volume, and our valuation grew roughly 10x since that 2022 seed. Paxos specifically is interesting because they’re a regulated stablecoin issuer in their own right, so there’s real product synergy there beyond just capital. Over the next five years, I think the winners will be the companies that built banking relationships and regulatory licenses first, not the ones that built the flashiest product.

How has Brazil’s regulatory framework shaped enterprise stablecoin adoption?

Brazil classifying virtual asset cross-border flows as foreign exchange operations was a turning point. It’s pushing institutional volume away from non-bank providers and toward bank-grade infrastructure, which is exactly where we operate. We built our entire stack in one of the most complex regulatory FX environments in the world, and that’s precisely why global enterprises trust us to operate in markets where less-prepared companies can’t. It’s also exactly why we’re confident in expanding to APAC. We’re not starting from zero there. We’ve already gone through the process of developing the right banking relationships, understanding the ecosystem, and meeting the market where it is. All of those lessons carry on. The changes we’re seeing in the Brazilian market since the new regulations are bound to replicate themselves in other markets as they get regulated, and we’re fortunate to know what to expect and how to position ourselves.

What real-world business use cases are driving adoption beyond trading?

The use case people don’t talk about enough is treasury management for companies operating across borders. We’re now processing volume for four of the top global payment companies operating in Brazil and LatAm, including dLocal, OKX, and Volt.io, companies running e-commerce, streaming, travel, and gaming businesses that move billions of dollars and don’t want to think about which currency they’re holding or how settlement happens underneath. That’s the real opportunity, stablecoins as invisible infrastructure, not as a product people consciously choose to use.

How are U.S. regulatory developments influencing adoption in Latin America?

The GENIUS Act gives the rest of the world a clear signal that the U.S. is treating stablecoins as serious financial infrastructure rather than a gray area. That matters enormously for emerging markets, because regulators in Brazil, Mexico, and elsewhere look to U.S. policy as a reference point. When the U.S. moves toward CLARITY, it gives other regulators more confidence to build their own frameworks rather than restrict the space out of caution.

Why might dollar-backed stablecoins strengthen rather than weaken dollar dominance?

Access and liquidity are the real drivers here. Today, if I hold pesos in Mexico, I can move them globally with very little friction because peso accounts and liquidity exist almost everywhere. Brazilian real doesn’t have that same global access, which is exactly why a BRL stablecoin makes sense as a bridge, not a replacement for the dollar. For most of the world, the dollar already has the deepest liquidity and the most global acceptance. Stablecoins just make that dollar liquidity programmable and instantly accessible in markets that previously had to go through slow, expensive correspondent banking to get it. That accelerates dollar adoption, it doesn’t compete with it.

Why is regulated infrastructure becoming more important as institutional adoption accelerates?

Because the next phase of adoption isn’t retail users buying tokens, it’s enterprises moving real operating capital. When you’re talking with companies like Apple or Google, the conversation isn’t about the technology part of crypto, it’s about whether you understand their compliance requirements, their banking relationships, and their regulatory exposure. You can’t have that conversation credibly without regulated infrastructure and real banking partnerships behind you. Being regulated on both sides of a transaction, not just one, is what lets you build systems and flows you simply can’t build otherwise. That’s exactly the model we’re taking into APAC.

What still needs to happen before cross-border payments feel as seamless as sending an email?

More markets need to be regulated on both ends of a transaction simultaneously, not just one side. Right now we can move money efficiently between markets where we’re licensed directly or have strong partner banks, which is why our APAC strategy starts with Singapore. It has one of the best regulatory environments for cross-border payments in the world, strong global bank presence, and a regulator that actually understands the infrastructure. Other APAC markets like Japan are far more cautious, generally requiring local joint ventures rather than direct market entry, so the path there looks different. The vision for Trace is a world where a company can hold money, full stop, without thinking about which currency or which rail it’s on, but we have to build the regulatory connective tissue market by market to get there.

What does the global financial system look like in 2030 if this trend continues?

I think by 2030 the distinction between “stablecoin payment” and “regular payment” will stop being meaningful to the end user, the same way nobody thinks about which interbank network processes their card swipe today. I also think emerging markets will have driven that shift rather than followed it. Brazil, Mexico, and similar markets had the most painful cross-border friction, which is exactly why they adopted faster and pushed infrastructure providers like us to build the hardest version of this first. By 2030, I expect that infrastructure, and the bank partnerships underneath it, to have quietly become the default rail for global business payments, with most people never realizing stablecoins were involved at all.

Thank you for the great interview, readers who wish to learn more should visit Trace Finance.