Welcome back to the Bits and Borders newsletter for the week of August 24-28, 2026 where we’re exploring the week’s biggest stories across digital assets, AI and energy from the Latin America region.

Particularly interesting news out of Brazil this week as incoming regulations on digital asset exchanges appear to be weighing heavily on crypto market demand. We dive into that below.

Before we jump in, quick plug that my producer and podcast editor is available for some extra projects over the coming months. If you have needs related to recording, editing, and post-production for video and audio content, I can’t recommend her enough. You can reach her at lety@promenadeadvisory.com

This week’s top stories:

• 🇧🇷 Brazilian demand for crypto assets abroad fell 58% year-over-year in July, and nearly 80% from June, the first month under the Central Bank’s stricter VASP rules.

• 🇧🇷 Candidates in Brazil’s 2026 elections declared over R$1 billion in crypto asset holdings

• 🇧🇷 Alibaba Cloud opened its first cloud region in Brazil with two AI-focused data centers.

• 🇧🇷 The US War Department committed US$750 million to a Brazilian rare earths mine as Lula pushes a critical minerals law through the Senate.

• 🇻🇪 Venezuela and the US signed a landmark oil deal seven months after Maduro’s fall.

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

- AWS

Subscribe now

Bits & 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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

New Podcasts!

Two new episodes this week: the first is with KAST CEO Raagulan Pathy whom I had the chance to catch up with at Blockchain Rio earlier this month. I first had Raags on the show a year or so back to learn about his vision for KAST. A lot has changed since then, so in this conversation we discuss the growth of the neobank trend in Latin America, the path to scaling and winning in this tight market, and KAST’s new business product.

I also spoke with Honey Island Capital partner Gean Chu about the quantum computing threat to bitcoin. Gean has put a ton of effort into understanding the dimensions of this important question and offers some clear explanations of the actual threat at hand and the solutions being proposed regarding post-quantum signatures, etc.

🙌 Listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

Brazil crypto demand drops 58% in July

The first hard data on Brazil’s stricter crypto rules is in, and it’s stark. The Central Bank reported that crypto asset demand fell 58.4% year-over-year in July, dropping to US$572 million from US$1.37 billion in July 2025. The sequential decline was even sharper: June had recorded US$2.6 billion in crypto flows, making the month-over-month drop nearly 80%.

Fernando Rocha, head of the Central Bank’s statistics department, attributed the contraction directly to regulation:

“It reflects a moment of reorganization of the virtual assets market in the context of intensification of regulation and conduct supervision by the Central Bank over this sector.”

He cited governance requirements and anti-money laundering compliance frameworks as the primary drivers, and added that it remains to be seen how the data will perform in the coming months.

The timing is not coincidental. On July 1, the Central Bank published its prudential framework for virtual asset service providers, requiring crypto platforms to meet the same risk management, capital, and disclosure standards as other institutions in the national financial system, starting January 1, 2027.

The year-to-date picture is very different, however. From January through July, Brazilian crypto investment totaled US$15.25 billion, double the US$7.6 billion in the same period of 2025. The Central Bank’s data also covers only crypto assets with an identified issuer, captured through foreign exchange transactions, so the figures likely undercount total activity.

📰 Source: Valor

Brazil’s 2026 political candidates declare R$1 billion+ in crypto

Candidates running in Brazil’s 2026 elections declared more than R$1 billion in crypto and digital assets to the electoral court, according to a review of the public wealth database. In total there were 320 crypto-related asset entries across 162 candidacies spread across the country.

The headline number comes with a large asterisk. R$500 million of it is concentrated in a single asset held by Fernando Irineu de Souza, known as “Fe,” a candidate for state deputy in São Paulo. Souza declared that he holds R$500 million in a “Community Token” that, by his own description, does not exist yet. That single entry accounts for nearly his entire declared net worth of R$501 million.

Strip out the phantom token and the real picture is more modest but still notable, a meaningful cross-section of Brazil’s political class now holding disclosed digital assets. Still it’s worth remembering that self-declared valuations to the electoral court are exactly that: self-declared, with no requirement that the underlying asset be liquid, audited, or in this case even launched.

📰 Sources: Portal do Bitcoin | Portal do Bitcoin | BitNotícias

Alibaba Cloud opens its first cloud region in Brazil

The cloud arm of China’s Alibaba announced two data centers in Brazil, its first in the country and the anchor of a newly launched cloud region. The facilities will offer cloud services plus a suite of agent-based AI tools aimed at local businesses.

This is a significant marker in the region’s data center buildout. It puts one of the world’s largest cloud providers on the ground in Brazil at the exact moment the AI infrastructure race in Latin America is heating up, and it plants a Chinese flag in a market where US hyperscalers have dominated.

Alibaba is explicitly framing the launch around AI, positioning it as a platform for Brazilian companies to build and deploy agent-based services locally rather than routing everything through data centers abroad.

The timing dovetails with a broader policy push. Brazil’s Senate could vote as soon as next week on tax incentives for data centers, and operators have been scrambling for tax alternatives in the absence of the stalled Redata framework, according to PwC.

📰 Sources: DatacenterDynamics | Folha de S.Paulo | Exame | DPL News

US War Department commits US$750 million to Brazilian rare earths

The US Department of War committed US$750 million to fund a Brazilian rare earth mine, part of a broader US$1.6 billion funding package spanning from Africa to Brazil as Washington scrambles to build supply chains outside China.

Brazilian coverage put the injection at more than R$1.2 billion for the acquisition of a rare earths miner.

The politics are moving in parallel. President Lula pressed Senate leader Davi Alcolumbre to fast-track critical minerals legislation after the government noticed a foreign rush into four Brazilian rare earth projects. That urgency cuts both ways, the government is simultaneously opposing a US company’s plan to explore rare earths in Goiás and weighing whether to unwind the deal.

Vale CEO Gustavo Pimenta framed the stakes bluntly. He said:

“Critical minerals are the new oil of this generation, and Brazil is falling behind in this global race.”

Brazil holds some of the world’s largest rare earth reserves, but the buildout of processing and the legal framework to govern foreign ownership are lagging the capital that wants in.

US critical minerals proposals to Brasília have reportedly gone unanswered even as China looms as the incumbent buyer and processor. The next few weeks in the Senate will tell us a lot about how Brazil intends to play a hand it hasn’t fully decided it wants to play.

📰 Sources: Homeland Preparedness News | Gazeta do Povo | Folha de S.Paulo | Folha de S.Paulo | South China Morning Post

Brazil’s Receita Federal closes the offshore crypto loophole

Brazil’s tax authority has confirmed that crypto assets held abroad by Brazilian residents are subject to a 15% income tax, and that a R$35,000 monthly exemption long used to shield small crypto sales does not apply to them.

The legal basis is not new. The “offshore law” in force since the start of 2024, folded financial investments held abroad, including crypto custodied or traded through foreign institutions, into a flat 15% rate assessed in the annual return.

What the Receita has now done is settle the question tax advisers had been arguing over: whether the familiar R$35,000 small-sale exemption survived for crypto. The answer is no, and it applies retroactively to January 1, 2024.

Anyone who sold crypto on a foreign exchange since then relying on that exemption is ostensibly sitting on an unpaid liability. Tax is due when a gain is “effectively realized,” the agency said, listing redemption, amortization, sale, maturity, and liquidation as triggering events, and the calculation includes currency appreciation against the real.

There is one meaningful carve-out. Assets a resident holds in self-custody, in a wallet with no foreign intermediary, are not treated as located abroad and fall outside the 15% regime, taxed instead under the domestic rules. For a market where the Central Bank is simultaneously tightening the screws on regulated offshore-facing platforms, that is a notable asymmetry: the compliant, exchange-held route now carries a clear tax cost that the self-hosted route does not.

📰 Source: BitNotícias

🗞 LatAm Rundown

🇧🇷 Brazil

• Brazil’s Superior Court of Justice recognized the legal validity of contracts denominated in cryptocurrency, a meaningful precedent for enforceability in Brazilian courts. 📰 Source: BitNotícias

• A Receita Federal auditor was arrested holding R$31.8 million (US$6M) in cryptocurrency amid a corruption probe. 📰 Source: BitNotícias

• The Central Bank admitted its tokenization rules could clash with the CVM, Brazil’s securities regulator, over which body has jurisdiction. 📰 Sources: BitNotícias | Exame

• The Central Bank will convene Itaú, BTG and Bradesco to debate a crypto custody framework for Brazil. 📰 Source: BitNotícias

• The Central Bank has built a blockchain threat-monitoring tool with Hypernative and will begin distributing alerts through industry associations within two weeks. The driver is the Central Bank’s concern about tracing funds as they move from banks into wallets and exchanges. 📰 Source: Valor

• Itaú said the tokenization of collateral and guarantees is the primary use case it expects to scale over the next two years. 📰 Source: Exame

• Parfin launched Rayls Sovereign at Febraban Tech, a private, permissioned blockchain platform for financial institutions running tokenized products such as deposits, stablecoins, and receivables, where each institution keeps its data, keys, and governance internal and shares only cryptographic proofs in external transactions. 📰 Source: Valor

• Nubank rebranded its dormant NuCoin loyalty program into “lucky numbers” with no connection to crypto whatsoever. Recall that this follows the same trajectory as Mercado Libre killing Mercado Coin, loyalty-token experiments quietly winding down across the region. 📰 Source: BitNotícias

• The São Paulo state attorney general’s office (MPSP) signed a technical cooperation agreement with industry association ABcripto and blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis, coordinated by the MPSP’s cybercrime unit CyberGaeco. 📰 Sources: Valor | Livecoins

• France’s Voltalia won approval from Brazil’s export-processing-zone council, with tax exemptions attached, to build a 322.5 MW data center at the Pecém complex in Ceará. The projected R$181.7 billion (US$33 billion) investment would rank among the largest data center projects anywhere, though environmental licensing is still pending. 📰 Sources: Diário do Nordeste | Folha de S.Paulo | OpiniãoCE

• Brazil’s Senate could vote next week on tax incentives for data centers, a decision operators have been waiting on. 📰 Source: Senado Federal

• With the Redata framework stalled, data center operators are hunting for alternative tax structures in Brazil, according to PwC. 📰 Source: Exame

• Data centers planned for Sergipe are projected to consume more electricity than the entire state currently uses. 📰 Source: Marco Zero

• The government is opposing a US company’s plan to mine rare earths in Goiás and is reviewing whether to unwind the deal. 📰 Source: G1

🇦🇷 Argentina

• Ganfeng will invest US$180 million to consolidate its Lithium Argentina joint venture and a 150,000-tonne-per-year lithium project in Salta. 📰 Sources: BNamericas | pv magazine

• POSCO secured a US$700 million facility from BID Invest to expand its Argentine lithium operations. 📰 Sources: Dealroom | La Nación

• Lithium entered Argentina’s top 10 exports for the first time in 2026, displacing the auto sector from the podium. 📰 Source: Ámbito

• A Google study projected that broad AI adoption could lift Argentina’s GDP by up to 6.7%. 📰 Source: Infobae

• IFX will invest US$19 million in AI infrastructure in Argentina. 📰 Source: mercado.com.ar

🇨🇱 Chile

• The Kast government signed its first special lithium contract with a private company, Quiborax, for a US$70 million project. 📰 Sources: BNamericas | BioBioChile

• Chile’s Comptroller opened two audits into state miner Codelco over its lithium accord and copper production. 📰 Source: Rumbo Minero

• A Chilean AI delegation toured Silicon Valley, meeting Stanford, OpenAI, Google, and Nvidia. 📰 Source: Mundo en Línea

• Civil society groups from Chile, Mexico and the US petitioned the Inter-American Human Rights Commission over the environmental toll of data centers in Chile. 📰 Sources: TVN | El Ciudadano

• Chile is preparing the Foro del Litio 2026 to attract further investment. 📰 Source: La Razón

🇲🇽 Mexico

• Mexico is closing in on the number two spot in Latin America’s data center industry. 📰 Source: El Horizonte

• Mexico’s exports hit a record in July, driven partly by AI-related hardware demand. 📰 Source: El Ecosistema Startup

• The AI server boom is deepening Mexico’s dependence on Taiwan for critical components. 📰 Source: El Economista

• BitPagos and Entrepids formed an alliance to push Bitcoin adoption in Mexico. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

🇻🇪 Venezuela

• Venezuela and the US signed a landmark oil deal giving Washington majority control over more than 65 billion barrels of proven reserves, seven months after the fall of Maduro. Interim president Delcy Rodríguez called it “historic.” 📰 Sources: El Economista | El Economista

• Three people were arrested in Venezuela for buying dollars from the Central Bank and reselling them on Binance. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• A CriptoNoticias analysis argued Venezuela’s de facto dollarization via USDT has already hollowed out the Central Bank’s control over the currency. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• Trader Alberto Cárdenas described Venezuela as “a crypto laboratory, for better or worse.” 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

🇸🇻 El Salvador

• El Salvador will limit the purchase and use of Bitcoin as a condition of a US$1.4 billion IMF program. 📰 Source: Observatorio Blockchain

• Bitcoin use in El Salvador has fallen 99.8% despite its legal tender status. 📰 Source: Criptotendencias

• Merchants in El Salvador increasingly prefer cards over Bitcoin for payments. 📰 Source: Bitfinanzas

• One regional analysis nonetheless argued El Salvador still leads Latin America’s regulatory model amid renewed institutional appetite for Bitcoin. 📰 Source: Revista SUMMA

🇵🇪 Peru

• MMG confirmed the restart of operations at the Las Bambas copper mine, one of the world’s largest. 📰 Sources: KITCO | Mining Weekly | Mining.com

• Peru is losing its battle against illegal gold mining in the tropical forests of the Tambopata reserve, where operations run around the clock. 📰 Source: La República

• Peru has the geology to lead mining but the open question is whether its institutions can keep up, per a BNamericas analysis. 📰 Source: BNamericas

🇨🇴 Colombia

• Su Red, a 16-year-old Colombian transaction network, integrated a digital assets wallet into its app, letting users convert Bitcoin and USDT to cash directly in Colombian pesos at its physical points. 📰 Source: CriptoInforme

• Equinix expanded its Bogotá data center capacity and set up a global hub in the city. 📰 Source: Portafolio

• OKX signed on as main sponsor of the ninth edition of Cripto Latin Fest in Bogotá. 📰 Source: CriptoInforme

🇵🇾 Paraguay

• The cheap energy that first drew Bitcoin miners to Paraguay is now attracting a hardware giant. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• Mercosur and Vietnam held their first in-person round of trade negotiations in Buenos Aires toward a preferential tariff agreement. 📰 Source: Infobae

🇧🇴 Bolivia

• José Crespo Fernández, Bolivia’s ambassador to Mexico, pitched Bolivia as the “world epicenter of lithium,” as the country tries to convert its vast reserves into actual production. 📰 Source: ContraRéplica

• Bolivian graduate researchers are testing new lithium recovery methods in Jujuy, Argentina. 📰 Source: UNJu Diario

🇵🇦 Panama

• Panama installed its first Bitcoin ATM. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

Gean Chu is a partner at Honey Island Capital, a Curitiba-based venture firm founded by veterans of EBANX. I caught up with him for a deep dive on quantum computing, which has become one of the main factors weighing on crypto markets in 2026.

Quantum went from a distant theoretical worry to the story driving digital asset headlines this year, largely on the back of a March paper from Google Quantum AI that cut the estimated hardware requirement for breaking Bitcoin’s cryptography by a factor of twenty.

Gean and his team spent months researching the threat in order to make their own allocation decisions, and he walked me through what they found.

I highly recommend reading Honey Island’s full report if you want to learn more about this subject.

Another good resource is the Quantum Bitcoin Countdown podcast create by “Bitcoin Historian” (and former CoinDesk colleague of mine) Pete Rizzo.

We recorded this episode on August 25, and two notable things happened in the 48 hours after.

• On August 26, StarkWare mined what it says is the first quantum-safe Bitcoin transaction on mainnet, in block 964,199. The method was designed by StarkWare’s Avihu Levy, who published it back in April, and it uses signature grinding to attach a hash-based lock alongside the normal elliptic curve signature. This did not involve a soft fork or protocol change; rather, it was handed straight to MARA’s Slipstream service because Bitcoin nodes will not relay the non-standard format. This is a real world example of the private mempool workaround Gean describes in the episode. Both Levy and the MARA Foundation say private mempools are not a durable answer, and Levy still wants a protocol-level upgrade.

• The next day, Blockstream Research published a BIP for SHRINCS, one of the two signature schemes Gean walks through. His position in this episode is that the community should not lock in a scheme before it has been battle tested. That argument is now live rather than hypothetical.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Subscribe now

Bits & 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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

Key Takeaways:

• Roughly 6.9 million bitcoins have their public keys already visible on chain, worth somewhere near $550 billion at current prices. Gean says most of that sits with exchanges and custodians reusing the same addresses, which is an address hygiene problem they could fix today. The stubborn part is the roughly 2.4 million bitcoins in Satoshi-era wallets.

• The March 2026 Google paper put the superconducting requirement at about 500,000 physical qubits to crack a key in nine minutes. Google’s Willow chip currently has 105. Gean argues the more consequential development is Oratomic, a Caltech neutral atom startup that launched this year, which he says could do the same job with 10,000 qubits and already has circuits running around 6,000.

• The two competing quantum hardware designs create very different problems:

  • Superconducting machines are fast but enormous, needing roughly 500,000 physical qubits to crack a key in nine minutes, which is quick enough to steal a transaction while it sits waiting to be confirmed.

  • Neutral atom machines need far fewer qubits but run much slower. Gean puts a 10,000-qubit neutral atom system at about three years to open a single wallet, and a 26,000-qubit system at about three days.

Three days is a real danger to coins whose keys are already exposed on chain, and nowhere near fast enough to beat Bitcoin's ten-minute block time. That ordering is the reassuring part of his analysis. The version of this attack that would break Bitcoin as a payment network is the version furthest from being buildable, and the version that is closest can only reach coins that are already sitting exposed.

• Post-quantum signatures exist and NIST (US National Institute of Standards and Technology) has been working on them since 2016, but they do not fit inside a Bitcoin block. Developers are addressing this by building variants tailored specifically to Bitcoin. Gean’s position is that pushing an immature scheme into consensus would inject more risk than it removes.

• The Bitcoin community has been more engaged on this issue than its critics allow. Gean says quantum went from around 5% of traffic on the Bitcoin dev mailing list to roughly half of it, and the proposals on the table range from doing nothing at all to freezing exposed coins to a maritime salvage framework where whoever cracks a wallet becomes a custodian rather than an owner.

• Regarding “Q-Day” timing, he defers to the institutions that have moved their own deadlines forward, with Google, Cloudflare and the US government all now targeting 2029 or 2030. Once a workable signature exists, he says 98% of bitcoins could migrate in under a week using a quarter of available block space.

I enjoyed this conversation with Gean and I hope you do as well. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

Have a great weekend everybody.

-AWS

Recent Episodes

Raagulan Pathy is the CEO of KAST, one of the fastest growing stablecoin neobanks in the world. I caught up with him at Blockchain Rio 2026 to discuss what a year of scaling has done to his thesis on consumer stablecoin banking.

Raags first joined the show roughly a year ago, back when KAST was arguing that builders had neglected the consumer layer on top of stablecoin rails.

Since then the company has raised around $80 million in a Series A, started acquiring its own licenses, made several acquisitions, and launched a business product.

It has also swapped a planned token airdrop for equity exposure, which is a bet worth watching as the rest of the sector figures out how to reward loyal users over the long-term

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Subscribe now

Bits & 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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

Key Takeaways:

• Raags treats the category as winner take most. By his count a handful of stablecoin neobank players already hold something like 90% of the market while more than 100 others split the remainder, and scale is what buys the partner economics needed to fund incentives at all.

• KAST pulled its planned token in favor of equity exposure. A single digit percentage of users left to farm elsewhere, and the team is now working out how to make part of that position spendable so anyone who wants an exit can take one.

• The company is launching Reserve, a yield product paying boosted rates of 6, 9 and 12% through the end of the year, up 50% from its base tiers. KAST subsidizes the gap.

• Roughly 20 to 30% of consumer users were already running business spend through their KAST card. The company identified this from MCC codes and used this as the basis for building a business product.

• Latin America has the strongest product-market fit because the region is dollar-linked and people move across it constantly. Brazil has been something of an exception given the strength of BRL this year but it still remains a key market. and KAST is rolling out zero FX across the region.

• Growth is now moving beyond crypto-natives and aimed at regular people who are looking for practical financial tools.

• On regulation, Raags compares governments to a regulator that would make every Uber driver get a taxi license. Most write stablecoin rules off a banking and payments starting point, and most do not land it on the first try.

I enjoyed this conversation with Raags and I hope you do as well. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

Have a great weekend everybody.

-AWS

Recent Episodes

If you happen to be in Florianopolis for the Magic Island pop-up city this week make sure you should check out the U.S. AI Symposium being presented by our friends at Founder Haus, and also the first-ever BitAngels event in the region on August 28. BitAngels is the world’s largest investor network focused on crypto and blockchain startups, so this is a great opportunity if you’re building in that area.

Also worth having a look at my Forbes column from this week about a fascinating new Latin America-focused digital identity pilot built by former Inter-American Development Bank technologist Marcos Allende.

This week’s top stories:

• 🇺🇾 Tether’s US$120 million bitcoin mining bet in Uruguay unravels over a power bill fight with the state utility

• 🇧🇷 OpenAI formally opens in São Paulo and says Brazil is now a top-five market by revenue

• 🇧🇷 Brazil commits R$2.5 billion (US$480 million) to homegrown AI infrastructure, with a supercomputer headed to Rio Grande do Norte

• 🇧🇷 A Datafolha survey finds 29 million Brazilians have held crypto, more than stocks or fixed income

• 🇲🇽 Sheinbaum sets a 2027 deadline to pull Mexico’s stubborn cash economy onto digital rails

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

- AWS

Subscribe now

New Podcasts!

This week’s episode is with Ilya Brovin, chief growth officer of Sumsub. I caught up with him at Bitso Business’ Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City earlier this summer to discuss how AI is changing the economics of identity fraud.

By the company’s own numbers, Sumsub onboards 12 to 15 million people a month across roughly 4,000 clients, which makes for a useful vantage point on what fraud actually looks like right now.

What Brovin describes is a shift from humans faking documents to agents doing it programmatically, at a speed and volume that older detection methods were never built for.

🙌 Listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

Tether’s US$120 million bitcoin mining bet in Uruguay collapses

Tether’s ambitious plan to turn Uruguay into a mining beachhead has fallen apart, according to a Reuters investigation published this week.

The company committed roughly US$120 million in 2023 to build two bitcoin mining sites in Uruguay’s Florida department, intended as a testing ground before expanding into Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina.

The reportedly project collapsed after a dispute with state utility UTE over electricity supply and pricing. Tether’s local entity Microfin stopped paying its power bills in mid-2025, UTE cut power to the sites in July, and by November Tether had told Uruguayan labor authorities it would cease operations and lay off most of its staff.

From Tether’s standpoint, the ability to pack up and leave like this is a feature not a bug. The portability of the hardware is the whole point, one source told Reuters:

“This plug-and-play infrastructure is very easy to do, literally pulling the plug and then move it to somewhere else.”

Another was blunter on the country’s prospects:

“Uruguay isn’t viable for mining, that’s the reality.”

The source argued that Uruguay’s grid is heavily renewable but expensive and tightly managed by a single state operator, a poor fit for an industry that treats electricity as a commodity to be arbitraged across borders.

The episode is a useful reality check on the narrative that cheap, clean LatAm power automatically translates into a mining hub.

📰 Sources: Reuters | CriptoNoticias

Brazil is now among OpenAI’s five largest markets by revenue

OpenAI formally launched its Brazilian business operation this week, opening a São Paulo office and escalating its competition with Google for AI model supply to companies and consumers.

Rival Anthropic still sells into Brazil only through partners, with no local operation yet.

The numbers behind the move are striking. VP of International Strategy and Operations Oliver Jay said Brazil is definitively among OpenAI’s top five markets by revenue, driven by exceptionally high subscription rates, and ranks third worldwide by active users behind only the US and India.

Daily messages surged from around 140 million in November to roughly 215 million, a 53.6% jump, while the enterprise division grew five-fold year over year on demand for AI agents. Brazil ranks second globally among API developers.

Jay described OpenAI’s approach to the market:

“We tend to be very cautious, establishing a core local team first, then growing from there.”

The company also announced a partnership with the São Paulo city government to apply AI to municipal operations, its first such initiative in Latin America, plus an AI literacy tie-up with the ITA engineering institute and support for large enterprise clients including Nubank and Itaú.

📰 Sources: Valor International | Bloomberg Línea | CNN Brasil

Brazil commits R$2.5 billion to build its own AI infrastructure

The federal government announced a R$2.5 billion (US$480 million) package this week to equip Brazil with domestic AI infrastructure, anchored by a new supercomputer that will cost a little over R$1 billion on its own.

The machine will be housed at the Augusto Severo Science and Technology Park, linked to the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte, in Macaíba near Natal, with the public tender for the purchase set to run through the Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation.

The stated motivation is sovereignty over compute. Officials pointed out that roughly 60% of everything processed for Brazilian AI is currently done abroad, a dependency the government wants to cut.

“We’re going to reduce our dependence. Sixty percent of everything processed from Brazilian intelligence is done outside, and now we’ll be able to process it here.”

Notably, the strategy behind the spending is as revealing as the figure itself: Brazil has pulled in both Chinese and American technology partners to stand up the Rio Grande do Norte buildout, a deliberate hedge at a moment when compute has become a geopolitical chip.

Lula framed the project as an opportunity bet on Brazilian talent:

“We’re going to prove that Brazilians, our academics and our youth, owe nothing to anyone. They just need opportunity.”

📰 Sources: Agência Brasil | Exame | Jornal Onze de Maio

Nearly 29 million Brazilians have owned crypto

Crypto has become one of the most widely held asset classes in Brazil, with 17.2% of Brazilians over 16, roughly 29 million people, reporting they have or have had money in crypto.

That’s according to the second National Cryptocurrency Survey by Paradigma and Datafolha, based on 2,004 respondents across 137 municipalities in May 2026.

Notably, crypto now reaches 2.3x more Brazilians than stocks, which sit at 7.4% penetration, and also runs ahead of gold (9.8%), foreign currencies like dollars (14%) and fixed income such as government bonds and CDBs (15.1%). Only savings accounts (57.1%), real estate (34%), cash at home (30.5%) and investment funds (26.1%) rank higher.

Just as important is how people are getting exposure. 83% of crypto owners hold it through bank apps, versus only 20% through dedicated exchanges, a distribution that says a great deal about who controls the on-ramp in Brazil.

📰 Sources: Valor | Portal do Bitcoin | Exame

Sheinbaum seeks to bring Mexico’s cash economy onto digital rails

Cash remains stubbornly dominant in Mexico. About 85% of Mexicans say they mostly use cash for purchases under 500 pesos (~US$30), informal workers avoid digital payments to limit tax exposure, and card fees of 2 to 4% per sale make electronic acceptance painful for small merchants.

President Claudia Sheinbaum has tasked adviser Jose Antonio Pena Merino with changing that, targeting at least 50% of adults making one digital payment by 2027.

The plan revives Codi, the Central Bank’s 2019 real-time payments platform that never gained traction, in explicit contrast to Brazil’s Pix. This time the emphasis is on standardizing the user experience so the product actually solves a problem. Advisor Pena Merino said:

“The president had this in her head from the beginning. In 2027, at least 50 per cent of adults will make at least one digital payment. In the end, if you make a product that solves a problem, it’ll be adopted.”

Pena Merino frames digital payments as a lever on far more than convenience:

“It’s the starting point to reduce informality, improve productivity, increase the tax take, increase financial inclusion and even reduce crime rates.”

📰 Source: Financial Times

🗞 LatAm Rundown

🇧🇷 Brazil

• The CVM, Brazil’s securities regulator, signaled it will ease Resolution 88, the crowdfunding rule now governing most tokenized debt, as annual tokenized credit volume jumped from R$250-300 million before 2023 to R$4 billion last year. Superintendent Bruno de Freitas Gomes said “the CVM’s view is one of expansion, not retraction.” 📰 Source: Valor

• Digitra.com, with around 200,000 clients, is shutting down its retail crypto operation, blaming the cost and governance demands of the Central Bank’s new VASP rules in force since February, and opted not to seek authorization. Clients can migrate to Foxbit, which is offering fee discounts. 📰 Sources: Valor | Portal do Bitcoin | Exame

• Hyperledger Besu, the blockchain the Central Bank selected for Drex pilot testing, contained five security vulnerabilities that could interrupt consensus, according to security firm CertiK, which reported them privately. The flaws affected all versions before 26.7.1, including the 24.1.1 build used in the initial Drex pilots. 📰 Source: BitNotícias

• Brazil’s Central Bank is preparing to contract a crypto-flow monitoring tool aimed at fraud against the financial system, with the likely vendor being Israeli firm Hypernative, which monitors over US$100 billion in assets across 75+ blockchains. 📰 Source: BitNotícias

• Brazilian crypto companies are preparing a self-regulatory framework to push back against what they describe as the Central Bank’s heavy hand on the sector. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• CVM president Otto Lobo met with the NYSE and Nasdaq in New York to present the regulator’s tokenization agenda. 📰 Sources: Livecoins | Cointelegraph Brasil

• Bybit’s deadline for Brazilian clients to update registration data passed August 21 as it migrates users to a new local entity, with accounts facing restrictions for those who missed it. 📰 Sources: Portal do Bitcoin | Livecoins

• Crypto is banned on Brazil’s licensed betting platforms but not on clandestine operators, where it moves funds across borders. In July, Federal Police launched Operation Véu de Maia, probing 87 companies suspected of laundering for irregular betting operations. 📰 Source: Valor

• Payments firm Interlace entered Brazil as stablecoin payment activity grows across Latin America. 📰 Source: Crypto News

• ANPD, Brazil’s data protection authority, opened a monitoring action into ChatGPT, Gemini, Instagram and other platforms and app stores, giving companies ten business days to detail how they comply with child-protection rules. 📰 Source: Olhar Digital

• Patria raised R$550 million in its fourth venture capital fund, targeting fintechs and Latin America broadly. 📰 Source: NeoFeed

• A data center planned for Campinas in 2027 promises capacity equal to roughly 40% of Brazil’s current total. 📰 Source: G1

• Terranova, backed by Actis, broke ground on a US$500 million data center in Brazil. 📰 Source: BNamericas

• Presidential candidate Pablo Marçal said he has bought bitcoin and would defend the market if elected, adding that his holdings would soon appear in electoral court filings. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Minas Gerais took the national lead in rare earths extraction in 2026, even as environmental agency Ibama flagged the cumulative impact of projects in the south of the state and recommended a joint assessment. 📰 Sources: Minas Informa | G1

• Justice Alexandre de Moraes said candidates who use AI to spread fake news should face removal from office, an early marker of how the 2026 campaign will handle generative tools. 📰 Source: Francês News

🇦🇷 Argentina

• Binance detailed its plan for Argentina: a single app where users see pesos and crypto, transfer and pay. 📰 Source: El Cronista

• Crypto bank Nexo is preparing a strategy to capture Argentines’ dollars and grow in the local market. 📰 Source: Clarín

• Amnesty International denounced an expansion of AI-powered mass surveillance under the Milei government. 📰 Sources: El Tiempo | Diario Digital Conclusión

• Buenos Aires City ranks as the second most AI-exposed jurisdiction in the world after Singapore, according to an occupational exposure index from the city’s Economic and Social Council. 📰 Source: Infobae

• Endeavor Argentina and AWS opened an AI Founders Lab for university AI projects. 📰 Source: mercado.com.ar

• Milei added AI specialist Adriana Baravalle to the government. 📰 Source: El Economista

🇨🇱 Chile

• Chilean miner SQM shares rose after an earnings beat and a higher lithium outlook. 📰 Source: Reuters

• Lithium Chile’s US$175 million China deal is facing scrutiny in Canada. 📰 Source: Mining.com

• Lundin Mining cut its copper production guidance after a second severe storm in Chile. 📰 Source: Seeking Alpha

• Chile and China deepened cooperation on AI and the digital economy. 📰 Source: Nuevo Poder

• Chile’s science ministry set six priorities for 2026-2030 and is preparing a new AI bill. 📰 Source: La Tercera

🇲🇽 Mexico

• KIO is evaluating a US$1.3 billion investment in what would be its largest data center in Mexico. 📰 Source: Infobae

• President Sheinbaum pushed back on the country’s data center boom, saying “Mexico should not be other countries’ data center.” 📰 Source: Xataka México

• AMD and Mexico’s science agency SECIHTI will jointly train AI and supercomputing talent. 📰 Sources: Hoja de Ruta Digital | TechRadar

• A Mexican man pleaded guilty to laundering nearly US$2 million in cartel proceeds using cryptocurrency. 📰 Source: Infobae

🇨🇴 Colombia

• Equinix expanded its bet on Colombia, adding capacity to its Bogotá data center and building out a global hub from the city. 📰 Source: Portafolio

• Internexa launched a point of presence at HostDime’s Bogotá data center. 📰 Source: Notimérica

• Colombia’s crypto market heads into year-end with an agenda focused on taxes, fraud and digital inheritance, still without a clear regulatory framework but with the DIAN tax authority stepping up controls. 📰 Sources: Noticias RCN | Infobae

🇵🇪 Peru

• Peru is targeting a US$33 billion mining investment pipeline over five years as the Fujimori government cuts red tape, with copper accounting for nearly 70% of a broader US$64 billion project portfolio. 📰 Sources: La República | Mining.com

• Solis Minerals is targeting rising lithium and copper demand with drilling programs in Brazil and Peru. 📰 Source: Proactive

🇻🇪 Venezuela

• Bybit enabled its virtual card for users in Venezuela. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• Venezuela signed oil-sector agreements with Hunt Oil and SLB in Houston, with the hydrocarbons ministry saying 916 areas are available and the country has changed its laws to ease foreign investment. 📰 Source: Diario Bitcoin

• Tankers are piling up at Venezuelan ports, some waiting up to 30 days to load, as aging infrastructure and power cuts cap the country’s ability to sell oil as fast as it wants to. 📰 Source: Infobae

• CriptoNoticias revisited what actually happened to the supposed “end” of Venezuela’s exchange-rate gap. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

🇵🇾 Paraguay

• Paraguay reinforced its surveillance of individuals and businesses operating with cryptocurrencies. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• Paraguay is giving up its fourth-place ranking in global bitcoin mining, CriptoNoticias reports, as the policy environment turns against miners. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

🇧🇴 Bolivia

• Foreign Policy argues Bolivia’s vast lithium reserves aren’t the gold mine they’re often billed as, citing technical, political and infrastructure obstacles to turning resource into revenue. 📰 Source: Foreign Policy

🇸🇻 El Salvador

• New digital-asset products in El Salvador are opening investment options starting from just US$1. 📰 Source: elsalvador.com

Ilya Brovin is Chief Growth Officer of Sumsub. I caught up with him at Bitso Business’ Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss how AI is changing the economics of identity fraud.

By the company’s own numbers, Sumsub onboards 12 to 15 million people a month across roughly 4,000 clients, which makes for a useful vantage point on what fraud actually looks like right now.

What Brovin describes is a shift from humans faking documents to agents doing it programmatically, at a speed and volume that older detection methods were never built for.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Subscribe now

Bits & 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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

Key Takeaways:

• The meaningful shift in fraud is not deepfakes themselves but who is deploying them. Deepfake tooling got cheap and widely available over the past two years, and what changed more recently is that criminals now train agents to run the verification attempts, probing systems for loopholes at a scale humans could never match.

• Brovin argues deepfake detection should be the last line of defense rather than the first. The model belongs at the end of a chain of 10 to 20 signals covering device, location, IP, injection attempts, document templates and even the wall someone stands against for a selfie. If the detection model is doing the work, something upstream already failed.

• The Sumsub ID product is pitched as Stripe Link for KYC. Users store validated documents in a secure wallet and reuse them for subsequent verifications, with the actual documents held off-chain and a privacy-preserving attestation published on-chain.

• Identity for AI agents must resolve back to human identity. Sumsub is not building agent protocols, but Brovin expects every protocol that emerges, on either fiat or crypto rails, to need verification of the principal behind the agent and the specific mandate that principal granted.

• He makes a direct case against instant settlement for retail users. Urgency is the lever social engineering pulls, and he argues for a middle ground that stays 24/7 without being instantaneous, giving people a few minutes to think without returning to multi-day TradFi timelines.

I enjoyed this conversation with Ilya and I hope you do as well. You can connect with him on Linkedin.

Have a great weekend everybody.

-AWS

Recent Episodes

Welcome back to Bits and Borders for the week of August 10-14, 2026.

It was great catching up with many of you in person at Blockchain Rio this past week. Hard to believe this was my fifth year speaking at this event; it’s been an incredible ride to see how this ecosystem has grown and matured over this time.

I had the privilege of hosting several sessions on the main stage and recording a couple of podcast episodes with some great guests.

Big hats off to Francisco Carvalho and the organizing team for putting together a great series of VIP events and a great main event.

I’m off to the beach for a few days to recuperate after a busy couple weeks.

This week’s top stories:

• 🇧🇷 Bradesco will sell Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana directly in its app and launch institutional crypto custody, with Foxbit as its first client

• 🇧🇷 The CVM is weighing a higher tokenization fundraising cap as Brazil’s real estate tokenization market crosses R$20 billion

• 🇦🇷 Chubut lands a commitment of up to US$5 billion for an AI mega data center

• 🇧🇷 OranjeBTC launches DIGY11, the first ETF of Bitcoin-ecosystem preferred shares on the B3

• 🇦🇷 Lithium Argentina outlines a US$4.5 billion expansion and hunts for a new partner

• 🇲🇽 Mexico will require full KYC on all bitcoin transfers starting March 2027

• 🇧🇷 Federal Police arrest Pixbet’s founder in a raid over an alleged stablecoin money-laundering scheme

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

- AWS

Subscribe now

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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

New Podcasts!

This week I chatted with M0 CEO and co-founder Luca Prosperi. Luca is one of the leading minds in the stablecoin world right now and has raised $100 million for his company, which is focused on building modular stablecoin infrastructure for partners like PayPal, Metamask and MoneyGram.

I first interviewed Luca for my show two years ago before stablecoins had become the main theme in crypto. For this edition, we discussed what’s changed in the ensuing period and how his stablecoin thesis is playing out in 2026.

I also spoke to team called Knowidea at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas earlier this month about a powerful AI predictive intelligence model they are deploying to improve decision making in high-stakes environments. Very cool project so worth a listen!

🙌 Listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

Bradesco to sell bitcoin in-app and launch institutional custody

Bradesco, Brazil’s second-largest private bank, revealed this week that it will begin selling Bitcoin, Ethereum and Solana directly inside its banking app, with plans to eventually offer trading in ten different cryptoassets.

The bank has launched an institutional custody service for digital assets, covering cryptocurrencies, stablecoins, and tokenized assets, targeting professional investors, asset managers, investment funds, financial firms, and corporate treasuries.

The announcement positions Bradesco as one of the few major Brazilian banks to move into digital asset custody at an institutional scale, while simultaneously following the retail path Itaú and Nubank have already blazed by putting spot crypto in front of ordinary account holders.

Foxbit, one of Brazil’s oldest crypto exchanges, will be the first client to use the custody service. For Foxbit CEO Ricardo Dantas, the partnership reflects the deepening integration between banks and crypto-native firms. He said:

“A partnership with an institution the size of Bradesco requires a high bar for governance, security, compliance, and operational robustness.”

Dantas added that Foxbit has been building infrastructure specifically to meet those requirements, including liquidity, digital asset, payment, and integration solutions that large institutions can use to develop their own products.

Bradesco director Ricardo Barbieri framed the expansion as a natural extension of the bank’s custody expertise into a fast-evolving market. “The goal is to offer clients the same governance, security, and reliability of our traditional custody operations,” he said.

📰 Sources: Valor | Cointelegraph Brasil | Portal do Bitcoin | Livecoins | Exame

CVM weighs a higher tokenization cap as Brazil’s real estate tokenization hits R$20 billion

Brazil’s securities regulator, the CVM, is studying a proposal to raise the fundraising limit under Resolution 88, its crowdfunding framework, from the current threshold to R$25 million, with a separate ceiling of up to R$50 million for registered securitizers.

The change would materially widen the runway for tokenization deals that today bump up against the cap.

Superintendent Antonio Berwanger told Cointelegraph Brasil the CVM is also considering a thematic regulatory sandbox specifically for tokenization, a model with predefined rules and multiple participants that would let the regulator compare projects side by side and measure the effects of competition.

📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | Cointelegraph Brasil | Cointelegraph Brasil | Cointelegraph Brasil | Exame

Argentina’s Chubut lands up to US$5 billion for an AI mega data center

The Argentine province of Chubut will receive an investment of up to US$5 billion to build a mega data center focused on artificial intelligence, one of the largest single technology commitments announced in Argentine Patagonia to date.

Patagonia’s draw is straightforward: cold climate, land, and access to energy, the three inputs that increasingly decide where these projects land.

For Argentina specifically, the deal lands as President Milei’s government works to signal that the country is open for large-scale foreign capital after years of currency controls and macro instability that kept investors on the sidelines. A data center of this size is exactly the kind of long-horizon, dollar-denominated commitment that had become rare.

📰 Sources: Momarandu

OranjeBTC launches DIGY11, the first Bitcoin-ecosystem ETF on the B3

OranjeBTC, Brazil’s largest bitcoin treasury company, announced the launch of DIGY11, the Digital Yield ETF, the first fund listed on the B3 dedicated to international preferred shares issued by companies in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

The fund is expected to debut on the exchange in early September.

DIGY11’s initial portfolio will be built from paper issued by Strategy and Strive, two US issuers that hold bitcoin on their balance sheets and use these instruments to generate recurring dollar income.

According to CoinDesk, the fund’s allocation is heavily concentrated, with roughly 95% weighted to Strategy’s STRC. The ETF will carry currency protection and is designed to make monthly distributions to holders.

The structure is a clever piece of financial engineering: rather than giving Brazilian investors direct bitcoin exposure, DIGY11 packages the yield-bearing preferred shares of bitcoin treasury companies into a real-hedged, dividend-paying wrapper listed at home.

OranjeBTC will seed the fund with R$25 million from its own treasury; 3R Investimentos will manage it, with Banco Daycoval as fiduciary administrator. Total cost is estimated at 1.30% per year, with projected monthly distributions of CDI plus 3–5%. CEO Guilherme Gomes described the target investor as someone who “thinks more with an income-investor mindset” and wants bitcoin ecosystem exposure without direct BTC price risk.

The launch capped a strong quarter for the company. OranjeBTC reported it acquired 375 bitcoin in Q2 at an average price of roughly US$65,500, about 8.5% below the asset’s average price for the period, and posted a gross BTC yield of 12.69%.

📰 Sources: Valor | Portal do Bitcoin | Valor | CoinDesk | Exame | Livecoins

Lithium Argentina eyes US$4.5 billion expansion and a new partner

Lithium Argentina laid out plans to invest US$4.5 billion while bringing in a new strategic partner, a signal that the country’s lithium buildout is regaining momentum after a punishing stretch of low prices.

The company also restructured US$220 million in debt to accelerate production at its flagship Cauchari-Olaroz operation, which produced 9,280 tonnes of lithium in the second quarter.

That capital is increasingly geopolitical. The United States announced a US$3 billion investment to strengthen the critical minerals supply chain as part of its competition with China, a decision that puts Argentine lithium and copper at the center of a possible economic transformation. Celorrio told Infobae that Washington’s goal is to reduce dependence on China for the minerals essential to technology and defense, though he was candid about the limits of the opportunity for Argentina.

📰 Sources: Bloomberg Línea | BNamericas | Ámbito

OranjeBTC nears breakeven despite US$33 million quarterly loss, launches DIGY11 ETF

OranjeBTC, Brazil’s largest bitcoin treasury company, reported a net loss of R$183.9 million (US$33 million) in the second quarter, almost entirely an accounting markdown on its bitcoin holdings as the asset sold off, not a real cash loss.

CEO Guilherme Gomes told Valor:

“We didn’t sell that bitcoin. So there was no realization of that possible loss.”

The company added 375 bitcoin during the downturn and holds 3,950 BTC on its balance sheet as of August 14. It also repurchased 4.5 million of its own shares, retired a US$23 million convertible debt early to head off future dilution, and locked in a new bitcoin-backed credit facility of up to R$210 million with a fund managed by Itaú Asset Management, the kind of balance-sheet moves a company makes when it's confident, not defensive.

After the quarter closed, OranjeBTC launched bitcoin.com.br, partnered with Escola Bitcoin Brasil, and unveiled DIGY11, the Digital Yield ETF: the first B3 fund built around international preferred shares of bitcoin treasury companies, expected to debut in early September.

The portfolio leans on Strategy and Strive, with roughly 95% of the allocation sitting in STRC alone. DIGY11 carries currency protection, targets monthly distributions of CDI plus 3–5% against a roughly 1.30% annual cost, and will be seeded with R$25 million from OranjeBTC's own treasury, managed by 3R Investimentos with Banco Daycoval as fiduciary administrator.

Gomes described the target buyer as someone who "thinks more with an income-investor mindset," seeking bitcoin ecosystem exposure without direct BTC price risk.

📰 Source: Valor

Pixbet founder arrested over stablecoin money-laundering scheme

Brazilian authorities launched an operation against Pixbet, one of the country’s largest licensed sports betting platforms, accusing it of laundering, tax evasion, and asset concealment.

Pixbet founder Ernildo Júnior de Farias Santos was arrested. Investigators also targeted prominent attorney Nelson Wilians, whose firm represents Pixbet, though his office said the relationship is strictly professional.

According to the Receita Federal, the scheme ran in three stages:

1. Bettor deposits flowing into Pixbet were routed to offshore shell companies with no legitimate economic activity to justify the volumes they received.

2. Those funds were then used to buy dollar-pegged stablecoins or converted to cash dollars at exchange houses and sent to accounts in tax havens.

3. The money returned to the operation from there, with stablecoins sent to group company accounts and the offshore funds coming back as dividend payments or operational capital.

Once back inside the business, investigators say, the laundered funds bought luxury goods and paid the government licensing fees Pixbet needed to stay legal. Ernildo is linked to two betting licenses, each costing R$30 million plus a R$5 million security deposit, under the federal licensing regime that took effect last year.

📰 Source: Valor

🗞 LatAm Rundown

🇧🇷 Brazil

• Mexican fintech ARQ (formerly DolarApp) will accelerate its push into Brazil after a US$70 million round led by Sequoia Capital, aiming to become the go-to bank for high-income Brazilians who move money across borders. 📰 Source: Exame

• Itaú signed a partnership with OpenAssets, a digital asset infrastructure provider that works with the parent company of the NYSE, for tokenization and capital-markets use cases anchored in the ANBIMA tokenization pilot. 📰 Sources: BlockNews | Cointelegraph Brasil

• Noah Cheung, who previously held regional leadership roles at KuCoin and MEXC, has been named country manager for Brazil at crypto exchange Bitget. He will oversee the exchange’s Brazil strategy, local ecosystem relationships, and product development. 📰 Source: Valor

• ANBIMA is preparing self-regulation for real-world assets and detailed a tokenization sandbox with 20 projects, testing debentures and investment funds on a closed DLT network with no real money or investors; custody will be the starting point for supervision. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• The BRICS bloc is discussing integration between its members’ instant payment systems and central bank digital currencies for cross-border payments, with Brazil’s Pix in the mix; India’s central bank chief Sanjay Malhotra confirmed the talks pointedly exclude stablecoins. 📰 Source: BlockNews

• A joint survey by KPMG and ABCripto finds that the institutions most likely to issue stablecoins in Brazil are building infrastructure for foreign exchange and corporate settlements, rather than retail. 📰 Source: Valor

• Brazil’s Central Bank put bilateral connections and shared cross-country networks for Pix on its agenda in a new report, aiming to build a system for international payments, though it named no partners, platform or timeline. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Brazil’s Central Bank confirmed it will create rules for crypto staking, extending its transparency demands around risk, redemption and rewards to the service offered by crypto firms, with no date yet announced. 📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | Exame

• Speaking at Blockchain Rio, the Central Bank’s Nagel Paulino defended the regulator’s posture bluntly. “Sometimes we need to brake innovation,” he said, arguing that market growth requires protection, controls and anti-money-laundering guardrails. Separately, the bank’s Ricardo Moura argued stablecoins “are not FX operations, but they are in the FX market.” 📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | Cointelegraph Brasil

• Brazil’s Finance Ministry said the country is at a crucial moment to define stablecoin rules, arguing the assets can open new markets and expand international operations if regulation balances security and innovation. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• The Central Bank’s Henrique Videira said tokenization could enable more active supervision using data registered by hash, reducing manual reconciliations, though he cautioned that technological capacity will dictate how frequently firms report. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• ABToken launched a crypto self-regulation program and is preparing training for the Federal Police, bundling risk controls, auditing and proof of reserves with partners IAAS and CertiK as the market braces for the Central Bank’s rules. 📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | Cointelegraph Brasil | Livecoins | Exame

• Deputy Julia Zanatta filed a legislative decree seeking to suspend the Central Bank’s Resolution 584, which allows crypto transfers to be held for 24 hours, arguing the monetary authority overstepped its regulatory power. 📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | Livecoins

• CertiK’s report on Brazil’s VASP framework found the country’s rules stricter than the EU’s MiCA on one point in particular: proof of asset segregation. 📰 Source: BlockNews

• Authorities launched Operação Criptoabate against a fake crypto investment platform running “pig butchering” scams, after a 70-year-old retiree lost more than R$37 million; investigators identified 140 possible victims. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Petrobras found indications of oil in an exploratory well roughly 175 km off the coast of Amapá, near the mouth of the Amazon. “Our optimism regarding the Brazilian Equatorial Margin is confirmed today,” the company said, calling the discovery “extremely important.” President Lula defends the drilling, arguing Brazil needs the revenue to finance its energy transition. 📰 Source: El Economista

• President Lula wants to unblock Brazil’s rare earths plan and promised to protect the sector from both China and the US, as American interests advance on the country’s only operating mine. 📰 Sources: O Cafezinho | InfoMoney

• Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies approved a fuels bill that includes a tax exemption for rare earths. 📰 Source: Metrópoles

• Brazil’s environmental agency Ibama warned about the impacts of rare earths extraction in southern Minas Gerais and recommended a joint assessment of the projects. 📰 Source: G1

• Sales of rare earths concentrate are set to begin in 2030 in Bahia. 📰 Source: Boca

🇦🇷 Argentina

• Milei appointed AI specialist Adriana Baravalle to lead the government’s science and technology policy. 📰 Sources: El Economista

• Argentine startup Kigüi, which uses AI to reduce food waste by 40%, raised investment from Amazon. 📰 Source: El Ecosistema Startup

• Argentina’s Vaca Muerta boom pushed the country’s fuel and energy trade surplus to US$5.08 billion in the first half of 2026, up 61.7% year on year, and Chile’s energy minister confirmed the two countries are negotiating an energy integration deal she called “win-win.” 📰 Source: Infobae

🇨🇱 Chile

• Chile will let its state copper miner Codelco reinvest all of its profits for the first time in 50 years, a move to shore up the ailing company’s finances. 📰 Sources: UPI | Financial Times

• BHP’s Escondida, the world’s largest copper mine, urged Chile to provide regulatory certainty to unlock further copper investment. 📰 Source: Mining Weekly

• Chile’s markets regulator, the CMF, detailed the rollout stages of its open finance system at the Blockchain Summit Latam 2026. 📰 Source: DiarioBitcoin

• Chile’s Science Ministry set six priorities for 2026-2030 and is preparing a new AI bill. 📰 Source: La Tercera | David Noticias

• Coal India is reportedly eyeing the acquisition of a Chilean lithium unit to boost its critical minerals supply. 📰 Source: Organiser

🇲🇽 Mexico

• Mexico will require full KYC on all bitcoin transfers starting March 2027, part of a broader tightening of anti-money-laundering oversight now extending to crypto, casinos and real estate. 📰 Sources: BeInCrypto | CryptoRank | El País

• KIO is evaluating a US$1.3 billion investment to build its largest data center in Mexico, in Querétaro, on top of a separate US$200 million it plans to put into cloud and AI projects in 2026. 📰 Sources: Infobae | Mobile Time | EL CEO

🇸🇻 El Salvador

• Five years after adopting Bitcoin as legal tender, El Salvador’s experiment fell short of its original promises for the population even as it raised the cryptocurrency’s global profile, with adoption low and IMF support conditioned. 📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | Criptotendencias | Forbes Centroamérica

• The president of El Salvador’s digital asset authority, the CNAD, argued the industry needs to move past its own rhetoric. “We need to stop talking about crypto being the future,” she said, contrasting El Salvador’s dedicated regulator with Uruguay’s integration of exchanges and issuers into central bank supervision. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

🇨🇴 Colombia

• Colombia is reviving oil and gas after a four-year renewable energy push. 📰 Source: Brazil Energy Insight

• Binance will provide economic aid in USDT to those affected by the recent earthquake in Colombia. 📰 Source: Cryptonews

• Dollar-linked stablecoins dominate Colombia’s crypto market, according to Portafolio. 📰 Source: Portafolio | La República

• Colombia Fintech warned that a proposed tax on Bre-B payments in Bogotá’s tax reform would hit businesses that receive frequent low-value payments. 📰 Source: Portafolio

🇧🇴 Bolivia

• Peso and Yango Food activated USDT payments at more than 2,000 restaurants across Bolivia, extending stablecoin usage as a workaround for the country’s chronic dollar shortages. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• Bolivia designated lithium, copper, indium, bismuth and antimony as strategic minerals. 📰 Source: Rumbo Minero

🇺🇾 Uruguay

• Antel, Uruguay’s state telecom, will invest US$70 million to build an AI data center. 📰 Source: DPL News

🇻🇪 Venezuela

• Binance confirmed its card is rolling out gradually in Venezuela, a notable expansion in a country where USDT is a primary on-ramp for everyday economic activity. 📰 Sources: CriptoNoticias | CriptoNoticias

Luca Prosperi is CEO and co-founder of M0. I caught up with him to discuss the state of stablecoin infrastructure in 2026, from bank pushback on yield to the shift toward wallet-centric finance.

I first spoke with Luca about two years ago, before there was much regulatory clarity around stablecoins or serious talk of things like agentic payments.

Since then M0 has raised $100 million across three funding rounds and built out infrastructure partnerships with PayPal, MoneyGram, and MetaMask.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

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Bits & 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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

Key Takeaways:

• M0 has raised $100 million across three funding rounds since launching in 2022, and now employs roughly 50 people, mostly smart contract engineers.

• Prosperi expects stablecoins and tokenized bank deposits to eventually converge, with tokenized deposits potentially serving as collateral for payment stablecoins.

• He agrees with banks that stablecoins are a structurally superior technology, but rejects their push for regulatory protection, calling it a losing strategy that ignores a Darwinian shift already underway.

• Despite heavy investment and a wave of partnership announcements, Prosperi describes 2026 as a “lateral moving year” for stablecoins, with institutional use cases still stuck in proof-of-concept and crypto market liquidity down since October 2025.

• M0’s partnerships with PayPal, MoneyGram, and MetaMask reflect a shared pattern: brands want granular control over their own tokenized money rather than relying on USDC, USDT, or white-label providers.

• Prosperi expects local-currency stablecoins, not on-chain FX, to be the biggest trend of the next two years, with M0 already fielding requests from euro and yen clients.

I enjoyed this conversation with Luca and I hope you do as well. You can connect with him on LinkedIn.

Have a great weekend everybody.

-AWS

Recent Episodes

Welcome back to Bits and Borders for the week of August 3-7, 2026.

I was in Las Vegas last week for Ai4, which is the largest enterprise AI conference in the US and possibly the world. It was my first time attending an AI conference, and my first time attending any type of B2B SaaS event, so it was a lot to take in.

This industry is still in infrastructure-building mode. The energy is palpable, many companies that didn’t exist a year ago now with $100 million+ valuations, 75% of the booths seemed to be providing some sort of solution for the agentic stack: deploying, managing, training, etc.

Yet, Everyone has the same concerns about energy, the cost of compute and tokens, what will happen to these costs once the big US frontier labs go public, the role that open-weight Chinese models will play, etc.

It’s not quite my area of expertise yet, but its definitely an exciting space to be wading into right now.

I hosted a panel session on deploying AI agents inside an enterprise environment and a fireside chat with Erik Reppel, creater of the x402 agentic payments standard.

I’ll be releasing recordings of these as podcast episodes in the coming week so keep an eye out for those.

This week I’ll be at Blockchain Rio hosting a few sessions, recording some interviews and generally running around meeting folks so looking forward to seeing some familiar faces.

This week’s top stories:

• 🇧🇷 BTG Pactual will fold a crypto exchange directly into its banking app, auto-migrating Mynt clients in September.

• 🇧🇷 Brazil’s crypto associations are asking the Central Bank for a 120-day extension on the new licensing regime.

• 🇧🇷 Brazil’s central bank finalizes 24-hour hold on outbound crypto transfers above US$10,000, effective January 2027

• 🇧🇷 Former central bank president Roberto Campos Neto calls for a “public alternative” to stablecoins

• 🇧🇷 Brazil to create state-owned rare earth miner as global interest escalates

• 🇦🇷 Patagonia is emerging as a multi-billion-dollar magnet for AI data centers, with OpenAI, Green Capital, and Chubut province all in play.

• 🇨🇳 UnionPay pilots Pix QR code interoperability for Chinese visitors following Brazil’s May 2026 visa-free entry policy

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

- AWS

👊 Jump into our language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Subscribe now

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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

BTG Pactual to integrate Mynt in its banking app

BTG Pactual, Latin America’s largest investment bank, will integrate its Mynt cryptocurrency exchange directly into its main banking app, making it officially part of its core banking product in Brazil.

Mynt clients will be migrated automatically in September, with balances, assets, open positions, and transaction history transferred over without the user having to do anything. In practice, anyone who already banks with BTG will be able to buy and sell crypto in the same place they hold their normal checking and savings accounts.

📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

Brazil crypto associations ask Central Bank for a 120 day delay on new rules

Three of Brazil’s largest industry groups, ABToken, Zetta, and ABFintechs, have jointly asked the Central Bank to push back the deadline for firms to submit authorization requests under the country’s new crypto framework by 120 days.

Their argument is procedural but real: the complementary rules that filled in the details of the regime arrived late, they say, which compressed the effective window companies have to adapt.

The associations also warn of a bottleneck in the certifications firms need to complete before they can even file, meaning the current timeline risks becoming a scramble that pushes smaller players out.

📰 Sources: Exame | Portal do Bitcoin | Cointelegraph Brasil

Brazil to create state-owned rare earth miner as global interest escalates

Brazil’s rare earths have become geopolitical real estate, and this week the three-way competition for them came into sharp focus.

The country is moving to create a new state-owned miner, TERRABRAS, to consolidate national control over rare earth deposits, a step reported to be happening under direct pressure from Washington.

Brazilian rare earths are squarely on the radar of the US Department of Defense, which is treating the country as a potential alternative to Chinese supply for the magnets that go into everything from fighter jets to wind turbines.

China has also signaled interest in a rare earths partnership with Brazil in the middle of the US offensive, a reminder that it still dominates processing capacity and does not intend to be designed out of Brazil’s supply chain.

France entered the frame too, launching a commission to deepen cooperation with Brazil across critical minerals more broadly.

On the ground, at least one Brazilian producer is already picking a side. REA is in negotiations with the US government and expects to bring rare earth production online by 2031.

📰 Sources: Agência Pública | CNN Brasil | Associação Comercial e Industrial de Araçatuba | CNN Brasil

Patagonia is turning into Argentina’s AI data center coast

Argentina is fast becoming one of the more surprising destinations for AI infrastructure capital, and the cold, cheap-energy south is where much of it is landing.

The headline number this week came from Green Capital, which is planning a US$3.3 billion data center in Argentine Patagonia. It sits alongside reporting on a proposed OpenAI-linked mega data center in the country, and a plan for Chubut province to position itself as an artificial intelligence hub anchored by up to US$10 billion in investment.

Patagonia offers the two things AI compute is most hungry for: abundant, relatively low-cost energy, and a climate that cuts cooling costs. Argentina’s RIGI incentive regime for large investments (which is also fueling the mining boom detailed below) has made the country materially more attractive to the kind of multi-billion-dollar, long-horizon projects that data centers represent.

📰 Sources: BNamericas | Magazine Minero | dplnews

Brazil’s Central Bank finalizes 24-hour hold on outbound crypto transfers

Brazil’s Central Bank published the final version of its 24 hour hold rule on Friday, requiring virtual asset service providers to pause outbound crypto transfers above US$10,000 before processing.

The rule takes effect January 1, 2027.

The hold applies to transfers destined for overseas virtual asset entities or self-custodied wallets, and aggregates all of a client’s same-day transfers toward the US$10,000 threshold - closing the transaction-splitting workaround that the industry had flagged during the comment period.

Providers may release funds before the 24-hour window closes if their own risk analysis supports it, and must maintain daily records of fraud incidents and corrective measures taken. The bank was explicit that the retention does not constitute a permanent freeze.

ABcripto, a crypto industry lobby group, said the rule is the wrong instrument for the problem it is trying to solve.

President Julia Rosin said her objection is “technical, not ideological,” arguing that a time-based hold will push users who depend on fast settlement toward unregulated alternatives,DeFi protocols, peer-to-peer transfers, offshore intermediaries, reducing rather than improving the authorities’ ability to track illicit flows.

She also criticized the process: the sector had four business days to comment on the proposal, and the bank skipped a formal regulatory impact assessment. ABcripto said it intends to examine the bank’s justification for waiving that requirement.

The bank framed the rule as a response to the increasing use of stablecoins to rapidly move fraud proceeds to foreign entities or self-custodied wallets where recovery becomes difficult, and said the measure is aligned with international practice.

📰 Sources: Valor | Reuters

Campos Neto calls for
”public alternative” to stablecoins

Former Central Bank of Brazil president Roberto Campos Neto, published a column in Folha de S.Paulo arguing that the problems created by unregulated stablecoins are largely the result of central banks failing to provide a competitive public alternative.

His argument challenges several common talking points in favor of stablecoins frequently cited as gospel by the industry. Specifically, regarding the technology’s promise, he writes:

“The technology demonstrates that money can move at the speed of the internet. What remains unproven is whether this movement is heading in the right direction.”

He notes that 70-75% of USDT and USDC is currently held in self-custody wallets and that stablecoins now account for 84% of illicit crypto volume. This growing usage of self-custody wallets goes against decades’ worth of public policy that has steered money away from anonymity.

Campos Neto also argues that there is a gap between narrative and reality with regard to how these assets are being used.

“They were born as a means of payment: instant, cheap, and borderless. Yet they increasingly behave as a store of value, and a large portion of their use is restricted to trading within the crypto ecosystem.”

He cites new research by Wenxin Du, Catherine Huang, and David Scharfstein to argue that a stablecoin remittances are not actually cheaper in practice than existing services. The stablecoin “sandwich”, which involves conversion to a token, on-chain movement and reconversion at the destination, can involve exchange fees reaching 100 basis points and fixed costs that penalize small transfers.

“Fintechs like Wise and Remitly compress remittance costs to levels that are often cheaper.”

Countries like Argentina where stablecoins appear to be most useful should not be held up as shining examples of efficiency gains. Rather, the adoption is illusory in the sense that is a market distortion:

“What looks like a saving is actually the price paid to bypass capital controls that limit access to the dollar. It is not technological efficiency; it is a market distortion.”

He concludes by arguing that regulations targeting stablecoin issuers and centralized exchanges have limited effect because most on-chain stablecoin activity flows beyond their reach.

Acknowledging the role these assets will play in a future tokenized economy, he attributes these problems with stablecoins to the lack of a public alternative in the sense of Pix or Drex in its original vision:

“The issues surrounding unregulated stablecoins are, to a large extent, the result of the absence of a suitable public alternative.

Stablecoins have revealed the demand. It is up to central banks, through smart regulation and adequate infrastructure, to provide the instruments for this growing tokenized economy.”

UnionPay pilots Pix QR code interoperability for Chinese visitors

UnionPay International has launched a pilot allowing users of the UnionPay app and integrated Chinese bank apps to pay directly at Brazilian merchants connected to Pix.

Transactions are processed through Pix infrastructure, with plans to expand the pilot gradually to additional partner digital wallets.

UnionPay linked the timing to Brazil’s May 2026 introduction of visa-free entry for Chinese citizens, which the company said has driven increased visitor flows to Latin America.

Transaction volume on China-issued UnionPay cards at Brazilian terminals grew more than 30% in the first half of 2026 compared to the same period last year.

The pilot also sits within a broader bilateral financial cooperation track. In June, representatives of Brazil’s Central Bank and the People’s Bank of China met for the fourth session of their joint financial cooperation working group, which discussed improvements to cross-border payment and settlement systems.

A memorandum of understanding between the two central banks was signed in May 2025. UnionPay said the QR code interoperability initiative is one of the outputs of that process.

📰 Source: Times Brasil

🗞 LatAm Rundown

🇧🇷 Brazil

• KuCoin suspended deposits and withdrawals in reals, cutting off BRL access on the exchange. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Binance launched Rende+, its first yield product built exclusively for Brazil, offering 120% of the CDI with returns credited seven days a week and redemption at any time. Brazil country manager Thiago Sarandy said a US stock-investing feature is coming later in August. 📰 Sources: BlockNews | Cointelegraph Brasil

• Brazil ranks among the four most violent countries for crypto holders, who have lost R$150 million (US$28M) to physical attacks since 2023, according to Chainalysis 2026 Mid-Year Crypto Crime Report. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Crown partnered with Nexa Finance to bring its real-pegged BRLV stablecoin into Nexa’s investment infrastructure for advisory firms and family offices managing R$170 billion (US$33 billion). The tie-up could generate R$200 million in new BRLV allocations over 12 months, with holders earning a yield-funded return of about 93.5% of the CDI rate. 📰 Source: Valor

• The CVM, Brazil’s securities regulator, created a dedicated internal division for the tokenization of securities and the use of AI in capital markets. The reorganization lands as Brazil’s tokenized real-world asset market closed the first half of 2026 at about R$4.84 billion (US$900M) in issuances. 📰 Sources: BlockNews | Cointelegraph Brasil | Exame

• Brazil’s Ministry of Science and Technology is backing a project to integrate all of the Federal Government’s blockchain networks, focused on privacy, decentralized digital identity, and interoperability across public initiatives like the Rede Blockchain Brasil. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• The Federal Police ordered the freezing of R$2 billion (US$370M) in crypto tied to an illegal lottery (”jogo do bicho”) network. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Senator Eduardo Braga introduced a bill that would establish general operating rules for crypto fintechs and tokenization in Brazil. The proposal's core principle: tokenizing an asset does not change the regulatory obligations tied to the underlying operation. 📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | Livecoins

• In a separate operation, the Federal Police executed a warrant to freeze 14 accounts at Brazilian bitcoin exchanges. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• The Receita Federal has collected R$8.3 million (US$1.5M) in fines tied to errors in crypto asset declarations, according to Finance Ministry data. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Former Central Bank president Roberto Campos Neto argued that stablecoins do not make remittances cheaper and have “lost their function,” pointing to conversion costs, warning about dollarization, and defending Drex as the regulated public alternative. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• ABcripto, Brazil’s main crypto industry association, called the same 24-hour hold rule (see feature above) the wrong tool for fighting fraud, warning it will push users toward unregulated alternatives like DeFi and peer-to-peer transfers; president Julia Rosin said the objection is “technical, not ideological,” and also faulted the Central Bank for giving the sector just four business days to comment and skipping a formal regulatory impact assessment. 📰 Source: Valor

• Brazil’s crypto market moved R$505.5 billion in operations declared to the Receita Federal in 2025, up about 21.5% year over year, with four stablecoins accounting for R$364.34 billion of the total. 📰 Source: Portal do Bitcoin

• Méliuz increased its bitcoin-per-share balance and announced a new share buyback program. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Brazilian crypto asset manager Hashdex closed its bitcoin ETF in the US after struggling to attract investors. 📰 Source: Portal do Bitcoin

• Zayra, a startup that teaches blockchain and tokenization, raised R$15 million (~US$2.8M) to launch a new platform. 📰 Source: Exame

• Canadian miner Resouro is raising capital for a US$160 million rare earths and titanium project in Brazil. 📰 Source: BNamericas

• Meteoric plans to invest US$498 million in its Caldeira rare earths project in Minas Gerais and signed a strategic supply partnership with South Korea’s POSCO. 📰 Sources: CNN Brasil | POSCO / 매일경제 | Estadão Blue Studio

• France launched a commission to expand cooperation with Brazil in critical minerals. 📰 Source: Diário do Comércio

• Goiás approved a state policy for sustainable rare earths mining, setting exploration rules through the state legislature. 📰 Sources: Metrópoles | Diário de Goiás

• Hyundai Motor Group chairman Chung Eui-sun said the company is accelerating green hydrogen production and hydrogen truck deployment as part of new business in Brazil. 📰 Source: 머니투데이

🇦🇷 Argentina

• Argentina approved five projects under its RIGI large-investment regime worth nearly US$14 billion, with a heavy focus on mining and lithium. 📰 Source: rumbominero.com

• The government granted RIGI access to the Vicuña project, unlocking an initial investment of up to US$9.7 billion in what is considered the largest mining project in Argentine history, after approving the electrical infrastructure to connect its San Juan deposits to the grid. 📰 Source: Infobae

• South Korea’s POSCO obtained RIGI access to produce lithium in Argentina. 📰 Source: Aduana News

• Rio Tinto has surpassed US$3.6 billion in lithium investments in Argentina, doubling its lithium revenue and accelerating project startups. 📰 Sources: Panorama Minero | Mendoza Post | iProfesional

🇨🇱 Chile

• Google restarted its US$200 million data center in Cerrillos, Chile, reviving a project that had been on hold. 📰 Source: BNamericas

• South Korea’s Naver is targeting the Latin American AI market with data center deals in Brazil and Chile. 📰 Source: Seoul Economic Daily

• South Korea and Chile signed five memoranda of understanding to deepen lithium and copper cooperation. 📰 Source: miningweekly.com

• Chile’s ENAMI said China’s antitrust review of a Rio Tinto lithium project has been delayed. 📰 Source: miningweekly.com

• An AI-driven project will expand electrical transmission capacity in southern Chile by 60%. 📰 Source: Portal Minero

• Start-Up Chile‘s BIG 12 cohort selected 59 startups, 60% of them AI-focused, backed by US$75 million. 📰 Source: El Ecosistema Startup

🇻🇪 Venezuela

• A lawsuit was filed in Venezuela with its evidence anchored to the Bitcoin network, using the blockchain as a timestamping and integrity layer. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• With Venezuela’s currency gap closing, CriptoNoticias examined whether the role of USDT as a dollar proxy in the country is shifting. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• Binance Earn has gone viral in Venezuela on promises of easy passive income. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• CriptoNoticias weighed whether Binance needs a local license to launch its card in Venezuela, concluding the answer is not straightforward. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• CriptoNoticias published a piece on whether Coinbase is available in Venezuela and what users can actually access. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

🇲🇽 Mexico

• Mexico has become the world’s second-largest exporter of inputs for artificial intelligence, though the World Bank warned the challenge now is accelerating domestic adoption of the technology. 📰 Source: El Imparcial

• Mexico will invest US$776 million in AI and US$1.5 billion in cybersecurity in 2026. 📰 Source: El Ecosistema Startup

• Movement, El Vecino, and RISE launched what they call the first digital dollar wallet for remittances to Mexico. 📰 Source: Criptotendencias

• The Mexican CEO of a US-based exchange was arrested after converting US$750,000 in cartel funds into crypto and later paying for a murder. 📰 Source: Infobae

• New rules in Mexico and Peru are reshaping how intellectual property intersects with artificial intelligence. 📰 Source: LexLatin

🇨🇴 Colombia

• Colombia launched its first fund with Bitcoin exposure, allowing investment from $1 million pesos with a capital-protection structure that shields the principal. 📰 Sources: Yahoo | La Nota Económica

• Dollar-pegged stablecoins now dominate Colombia’s cryptocurrency market. 📰 Sources: Portafolio.co | DPL News

• Brazil’s Patria expanded its Colombia bet with a new startup investment. 📰 Source: Bloomberg

🇵🇪 Peru

• Lemon launched “Gigantes del Perú,” its first pack of Peruvian stocks listed on Wall Street, bundling Credicorp, Southern Copper, Buenaventura, and IFS. 📰 Source: CriptoTendencia

• Solis Minerals advanced its Brazil lithium drilling and Peru copper pipeline in the June quarter. 📰 Source: Proactive

• Codrus secured copper and molybdenum assets in Australia and Peru. 📰 Source: Mining.com.au

🌎 Regional / LatAm

• A French miner will invest US$350 million to expand its lithium project in Salta, Argentina. 📰 Source: rumbominero.com

• Decade, a wealth-management fintech founded by a former Nubank CTO, raised US$85 million in a seed round. 📰 Source: Startups.com.br

• Following El Salvador’s lead, Panama will seek to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. 📰 Source: roundtable.io

• The head of El Salvador’s National Digital Assets Commission urged the region to create specialized digital asset regulators, speaking at the Blockchain Summit Latam in Chile. 📰 Source: cointelegraph.es

• Copper and gold are driving a mining boom in Ecuador, with sector exports up 65.3% year over year to US$1.381 billion in the first quarter, according to Ecuador’s Central Bank. 📰 Source: Infobae

🇧🇴 Bolivia

• Australian-listed Cosmos Exploration rose after an EAU Lithium merger expanded its Bolivia strategy. 📰 Source: Kalkine

• Bolivia is advancing a technical-support plan for sustainable lithium management developed with German cooperation, even as experts warn about water impacts before accelerating extraction. 📰 Sources: mhe.gob.bo | eju.tv

Welcome back to Bits and Borders for the week of July 27-31, 2026 where we’re exploring the week’s big emerging tech stories coming out of Latin America.

I’m in Las Vegas this week where I’ll be speaking at the Ai4 Conference. I’ll be moderating a fireside chat with x402 (the agentic payments standard) creator Erik Reppel on Tuesday and then on an agentic adoption panel later in the week.

If you happen to be around feel free to shoot me a note!

This week’s top stories:

• 🇧🇷 Brazil’s Central Bank confirms it’s studying a 24-hour hold on stablecoin transactions over $10,000, and Coinbase warns it threatens competitiveness

• 🇧🇷 The IMF flags gaps in Brazil’s crypto regulation, from asset segregation to stablecoin-specific rules

• 🇧🇷 A South Korean buyer takes up to 30% of a Minas Gerais rare earths project

• 🇧🇷 The CVM’s overhaul of Brazil’s tokenized-credit crowdfunding rules is drawing industry pushback over cost and market access

• 🇧🇷 Brazilian demand for crypto assets jumped 135% in H1 2026, with 90-95% of it now in stablecoins

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

- AWS

👊 Jump into our language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Subscribe now

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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

New Podcasts!

We have two episodes this week from the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in June.

The first is with Olivia Vande Woude who is tokenization lead at Ava Labs. We talk about the current distribution problem with regard to tokenized assets, and why she thinks a neobank shakeout and consolidation is coming soon.

The other is a panel I hosted on the main stage discussing the stablecoin adoption chasm with Olivia, Joao Reginatto of M0, Monica Ramirez of Anchorage Digital and Sheraz Shere of Solana Foundation. The premise for this panel is that if stablecoin technology is so great, why aren’t consumers and companies racing to implement it as we speak? TLDR is there are a lot of “unsexy” implementation challenges that still need to be overcome.

Brazil’s Central Bank wants a 24 hour hold on stablecoin transactions

Brazil’s Central Bank confirmed it is studying a rule that would let it hold virtual asset operations, including stablecoin transactions, for up to 24 hours before settlement once a transaction hits or exceeds US$10,000.

The regulatory also informed digital asset exchanges they have until October 30 to prove their compliance controls are up to spec.

The pushback was immediate. Coinbase’s regional director for the Americas, Fábio Plein, warned that the measure, if it stands, could hit exactly the market Brazil has spent years building. He said:

“If maintained, the proposed measure could compromise the competitiveness of Brazilian institutions.”

Coinbase’s broader argument is about proportionality, not principle: he framed Central Bank oversight of the market as natural, but argued new rules need to be built in coordination with the frameworks already in place rather than layered on top of them.

Blockchain attorney Pedro Torres seconded that regulation needs an actual impact analysis behind it, not “abstract invocation of prudential risks.”

Plein pressed the point further in an Exame op-ed, arguing generic rules imposed without data specific to Brazil’s market “generates serious distortions” and risks pushing activity toward less transparent jurisdictions.

The bank separately clarified that investment funds cannot act as crypto intermediaries, calling FX operations run through funds to import virtual assets “lacking legality.”

📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | Cointelegraph Brasil | Cointelegraph Brasil | Exame

IMF flags gaps in Brazil’s crypto regulation

The IMF’s latest Brazil financial stability report identified gaps in the country’s crypto oversight, even after the Central Bank’s 2025 regulatory push.

The report flagged missing legal frameworks for asset segregation at exchanges and for protecting client funds if a virtual asset service provider becomes insolvent.

It also identified delayed implementation of the Travel Rule and suspended VASP reporting access to financial-intelligence units, both of which the IMF said blunt Brazil’s ability to detect and respond to crime.

With regards to stablecoins, the IMF said relying on VASPs as custodians for these assets “presents clear limitations and should be complemented by stablecoin regulation” aligned with international standards.

📰 Source: Exame Estadão

South Korea moves on Brazilian rare earths

POSCO, a South Korean company, signed an agreement to buy up to 30% of the rare earths output from the Projeto Caldeira in Minas Gerais.

Rare earths are the choke point for everything from EV motors to defense hardware, and the scramble to lock up supply outside China is now reaching into Minas Gerais and Bahia.

The Korea angle is broader than a single offtake deal: the two countries are deepening cooperation across critical minerals and even fast-tracking space collaboration, part of a wider Korean push into the region that also touched Argentina and Chile this week.

The Brazilian government, for its part, is signaling it wants a say in how this plays out. Officials indicated they will conduct case-by-case analysis on taxing critical mineral exports rather than applying a blanket rule, a sign that the current government sees these resources as leverage rather than just another commodity to ship out.

📰 Sources: G1 | Revista Amazônia | Chosunbiz

CVM tokenization overhaul could hit 40% of Brazil’s debt token market

A push to overhaul Brazil’s crowdfunding rules is drawing pushback from market participants who say it would raise costs and narrow access.

The CVM, Brazil’s securities regulator, is looking to overhaul Resolution 88 by lifting the offering cap from R$15 million to R$120 million (~US$22 million), but it pairs that with new obligations on platforms, including a mandatory trustee agent requirement that industry groups say will meaningfully increase issuance costs.

Rodrigo Borges of CBA Advogados told Valor the real challenge is proportionality. He said:

“It makes sense to raise the limit from R$15 million to R$120 million, but with scaled or proportional rules around audit triggers and warehousing exceptions. The hard part is getting the regulatory dosage right.”

The deeper concern, per Mercado Bitcoin’s Vanessa Butalla, is that it blurs the line between the lighter crowdfunding regime and the traditional securitization framework under Resolution 60 - which is a much more complex and expensive regime built for larger, multi-party deals with no issuance cap. She said:

“If we move the market entirely to the CVM 60 regime, it’s as if we eliminated the current regime just to raise costs.”

Two other flashpoints are restrictions on warehouse structures, in which an originator extends or purchases credit before distributing it to investors, and new rules on real estate credit operations. Butalla also flagged that secondary market trading rules need to be addressed in parallel, so investors who entered tokenized deals have a clear exit path.

The CVM said it views the public comment contributions positively and is analyzing the feedback before a final board vote.

📰 Source: Valor

Stablecoins make up 90-95% of Brazilian crypto demand

Brazilian residents bought US$14.68 billion in crypto assets during the first half of 2026, up 135% from US$6.24 billion in the same period a year earlier, according to data released by Brazil’s Central Bank this week.

June alone accounted for US$2.54 billion of that, versus US$1.48 billion in June 2025.

Where demand was once concentrated in bitcoin and higher-volatility assets, stablecoins now account for 90% to 95% of all the crypto demand the bank can identify.

Fernando Rocha, head of the Central Bank’s statistics department, said the shift has been dramatic. He said:

“It changed radically. Stablecoins can be used as assets or as a form of investment, but they primarily tend to be used as payment instruments and other ways to settle transactions.”

That framing matters for how Brazil regulates the space. If the vast majority of on-chain flows are dollar-pegged tokens being used to move and settle money rather than to speculate, the case for treating stablecoins as an FX and payments question, rather than an investment one, gets stronger.

It also feeds directly into the ongoing debate over the proposed IOF financial operations tax on stablecoin transactions.

Rocha was candid about the limits of what the bank can currently see. It monitors foreign exchange contracts filed by service providers but does not yet have visibility into where the funds ultimately go within the balance of payments. He said:

“It’s as if we have access to the sources of these resources but don’t know exactly the use.”

More complete data will be available starting next year, he added.

📰 Source: Valor

🗞 LatAm Rundown

🇧🇷 Brazil

• Evertec completed its fifth Brazil acquisition, buying a 67% stake in BBChain for R$28 million (~US$5.1 million) to target the tokenization market, bringing its total Brazilian infrastructure spend past R$4 billion (~US$730 million). 📰 Source: Exame

• Bitget Wallet launched a card in Brazil offering cashback in Bitcoin, gold, and tokenized stocks, with Pix and international transactions in the same environment. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Atlas Inc., founded by former Mercado Bitcoin employees, is building an asset tokenization platform on XRP Ledger targeting real estate and telecom assets in Portugal and the US plus securitized products in Brazil and America. 📰 Source: Valor

• A new nonpartisan advocacy group, Juntos por Cripto is organizing everyday crypto users into the country’s regulatory debates as a counterweight to industry lobbyists, and says it has gathered roughly 10,000 supporters in two and a half months. 📰 Source: Valor

• The CVM’s tokenization working group held its first meeting with more than 50 market participants, setting a 60-day target to present rules for an experimental tokenization regime. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Guilherme Nazar, former Binance VP for Brazil and Latin America, joined the advisory board of fintech Z.ro Global Payments. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Binance partnered with the Ayrton Senna Institute on McDonald’s McDia Feliz campaign in Brazil, distributing 10,000 Big Mac vouchers for the August 22 event. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Banco do Brasil deployed an AI agent that cut the time to close corporate FX operations by up to 90%, from about 40 minutes to roughly four. 📰 Source: BlockNews

• Google launched its Gemini Spark AI agent in Brazil, which runs tasks in the cloud around the clock, available to AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers. 📰 Source: Canaltech

• Brazil joined a China-led initiative on artificial intelligence governance. 📰 Source: Opera Mundi

• Brazil is weighing new incentives to attract data center investment. 📰 Source: Valor

• A Banco do Brasil VP warned that an oversupply of data centers could crowd out energy needed for green industry in the Northeast. 📰 Source: Agência Eixos

• Brazil and South Korea signed an agreement on cooperation in critical minerals and the energy transition. 📰 Sources: Petronotícias | ES Brasil

• Brazil’s government will assess critical mineral exports case by case before applying export taxes. 📰 Source: CNN Brasil

• An Australian multinational plans to invest R$3.6 billion (~US$650M) in a rare earths project in Bahia, part of a broader Bahia and Minas Gerais play now heading to a New York listing. 📰 Sources: Estadão | CNN Brasil

• A nickel project in Brazil secured permits, funding offers, and offtake agreements, targeting a final investment decision by Q3 2026. 📰 Source: TradingView

• South Korea is courting Brazil for partnerships in artificial intelligence and rare earths. 📰 Source: Infodefensa

• Brazil’s energy council cleared the use of Petrobras pipelines to move federal pre-salt natural gas to direct auction sales, a move the government estimates could cut gas prices for large industrial buyers by 50%. 📰 Source: Agência Brasil

🇦🇷 Argentina

• Teramot, an enterprise AI startup out of Argentina, raised US$2.5 million. 📰 Source: El Ecosistema Startup

• An Argentine startup founded in the Once neighborhood, backed by Mercado Libre’s Marcos Galperin, raised US$30 million. 📰 Source: Infobae

• The presidents of Argentina and South Korea agreed to strengthen trade in energy, critical minerals, food, and artificial intelligence. 📰 Sources: EFE | MisionesOnline

• A lithium megaproject in Argentina doubled its bet with plans for US$2 billion in investment. 📰 Source: iProfesional

• Rio Tinto doubled its lithium revenue in Argentina, lifting its dividends. 📰 Source: Mendoza Post

• A new mining incentive under the RIGI framework will fund US$547 million to extract more lithium from the Salar del Hombre Muerto. 📰 Source: Urgente24

• A new map of all lithium projects now enrolled in Argentina’s RIGI investment regime tallies up the committed capital across the sector. 📰 Source: El Cronista

• A court in Salta embargoed lithium giant Posco, catching provincial officials by surprise. 📰 Source: Gente de Salta

• Argentina risks squandering its lithium and copper boom without timely infrastructure buildout, according to BNamericas. 📰 Source: BNamericas

🇲🇽 Mexico

• Mexico will begin debating comprehensive AI regulation in September, while moving to regulate the technology sector by sector and delaying a general law. 📰 Sources: El Universal Querétaro | El Economista

• Legal-tech firm LemonTech grew its Mexico headcount 300% as AI reshapes the legal business. 📰 Source: El Cronista

• Siemens presented AI solutions to strengthen Mexico’s energy infrastructure. 📰 Source: Cluster Industrial

• Mexico and China are advancing joint projects in AI, robotics, electromobility, and semiconductors, per science secretary Rosaura Ruiz. 📰 Source: SECIHTI

• São Paulo, Mexico City, and Bogotá ranked among the region’s best cities for startups, as LatAm’s ecosystem value grew 14.9%, ahead of the 10.3% global average. 📰 Source: La República

🇨🇱 Chile

• Chile’s Chamber of Deputies approved a bill targeting deepfakes and AI-generated content. 📰 Source: TVenserio

• Chile and South Korea agreed to strengthen the lithium and copper supply chain. 📰 Sources: Logística360 | Korea JoongAng Daily

• Chile and Germany are teaming up on lithium extraction. 📰 Source: Mining Digital

• AI firm Snowflake is landing in Chile. 📰 Source: InvestChile

• Chilean companies face a dual challenge of complying with the new Data Protection Law and managing AI risk. 📰 Source: LexLatin

• Researchers at the University of Chile developed technology to reduce water use in lithium extraction. 📰 Source: Revista Nueva Minería

🇻🇪 Venezuela

• Binance is preparing a card that lets users pay with cryptocurrencies in Venezuela. 📰 Source: iProUP

• A guide circulated on how to use OKX’s USDT-loaded rechargeable card from Venezuela, where dollar stablecoins remain the primary crypto on-ramp. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

🇸🇻 El Salvador

• Bitfinex secured an operating license in El Salvador. 📰 Source: CryptoRank

• With Nayib Bukele’s 2027 election rivals lining up, El Salvador’s Bitcoin policy faces its first real electoral test. 📰 Sources: DiarioBitcoin | CryptoRank

🇵🇪 Peru

• Solis Minerals advanced its Brazil lithium drilling and Peru copper pipeline during the June quarter. 📰 Source: Proactive

🇧🇴 Bolivia

• A delegation of European lawmakers visited Bolivia to explore cooperation on lithium and other critical minerals. 📰 Source: Visión 360

• Bitget backed the expansion of UNICEF’s Game Changers Coalition into Bolivia, Bangladesh, and Indonesia. 📰 Source: Estadão

🇨🇴 Colombia

• Invisible payments are emerging as a financial trend in Colombia, blending AI, tokenization, biometrics, and blockchain so checkout happens with almost no user intervention. 📰 Source: La República

• AI is cutting banking service costs in Colombia by up to 70% through automated credit analysis, onboarding, and compliance. 📰 Source: La República

This podcast is a live panel I hosted at the Bitso Business Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City in June. This session focused specifically on identifying and solving the practical roadblocks to stablecoin adoption, both on the payments and issuance side.

Joining me for this session are:

• Joao Reginatto, Chief Strategy Officer at M0

• Monica Ramirez, Managing Director at Anchorage Digital

• Olivia Vande Woude, Tokenization Lead at Ava Labs

• Sheraz Shere, GM for Payments and Commerce at Solana Foundation. I

Our panel dug into why the technology and the regulatory backdrop have largely caught up, but adoption inside real companies hasn’t. Accounting treatment, internal change management, vendor selection, and a shortage of qualified talent are still holding enterprises back.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Subscribe now

Bits & 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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

Key takeaways:

• M0’s Reginatto said it took MoneyGram roughly six months just to get board approval for its MoneyGram Dollar stablecoin, showing how internal governance can slow adoption more than the technology itself.

• Anchorage’s Ramirez said her team’s two biggest pain points are helping companies decide whether to issue their own stablecoin versus using existing rails, and connecting banks so they can mint and redeem stablecoins while working with regulated custodians and counterparties.

• Ava Labs’ Vande Woude named balance sheet classification and issuer fragmentation as the thorniest problems, noting that auditors still hesitate to treat stablecoins as cash because of de-peg and redemption risk.

• Solana’s Shere said the infrastructure is about 95% ready, but the remaining 5%, legacy system integration and limited off-ramp access in certain markets, is still the blocker.

• Panelists agreed the industry has a real talent shortage, with only a small pool of people who understand both blockchain and traditional finance well enough to lead a company’s digital asset strategy.

• In the lightning round, Reginatto predicted more stablecoin fragmentation before consolidation, Ramirez expects new US-based stablecoin use cases to emerge, Vande Woude called the white-label stablecoin gold rush value destructive, and Shere argued on-chain credit, not payments, will be the category’s killer use case.

I found this conversation to be very informative and I hope you do as well

Have a great weekend everybody!

-AWS

Recent Episodes

Olivia Vande Woude is Tokenization Lead at Ava Labs. I caught up with her at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City in June to discuss the distribution challenge facing tokenized real world assets.

Issuance has become commoditized, and the real fight now is over distribution. Olivia argues that most tokenized assets have targeted crypto native users, a limited addressable market compared to plugging into existing financial pipes.

Subscribe now

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Bits & 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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

Key takeaways:

• Open Trade, an Ava Labs partner spun out of Circle and backed by a16z and Mercury, has surpassed $200 million in TVL by offering stablecoin yield products of 3% to 13% through a B2B2C model with neobanks, exchanges, and wealth tech platforms, mostly in LATAM and APAC.

• Olivia expects a wave of consolidation among crypto neobanks and card issuers, predicting either mergers among smaller players or acquisitions by larger incumbents that already control distribution and user bases but lack tokenization technology.

• Crypto-backed card issuers like Rain have gained an edge by becoming principal members with Visa and forging partnerships with MasterCard, positions that are difficult for smaller competitors to replicate.

• Axiom uses stablecoin infrastructure on the back end to eliminate pre-funding requirements for MSPs and PSPs, freeing up 70 to 90 percent of working capital that would otherwise sit trapped on their balance sheets.

• Olivia is skeptical of vanity metrics like wallet counts and points to the distributed versus represented asset metric on RWA.xyz as a better signal of real utility versus assets that are effectively just sitting in a database.

• Ava Labs is also working with Blerify on digital ID and credentialing infrastructure built for a quantum resistant world, with new government and public sector partnerships expected in the coming months.

I enjoyed this conversation with Olivia and I hope you do as well. You can connect with her on LinkedIn.

Have a great weekend everybody.

-AWS

Recent Episodes

Welcome back to Bits and Borders for the week of July 20-25, 2026. I’m back in action after three weeks in Minnesota and South Dakota.

Next stop for me is the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas August 4-7 where I’ll be hosting a session with Erik Reppel, creator of the x402 agentic payments standard. This will be my first time speaking at a major AI conference so definitely excited for that.

Then I’ll be at Blockchain Rio from August 11-13 where I’ll be hosting a few different sessions. This year’s event is shaping up to be a great one so definitely encourage you to check it out if you can.

This week’s top stories:

• 🇧🇷 A new BIS study finds that capital controls which work on foreign-currency deposits have no measurable effect on stablecoin inflows, right as Brazil’s Central Bank leans harder on exactly those controls.

• 🇧🇷 B3, Latin America’s biggest exchange, launched options on bitcoin, ether and solana futures and is prepping its own B3RL stablecoin.

• 🇨🇴 Colombia’s SIC ordered the permanent shutdown of Worldcoin’s iris-scanning operation, and São Paulo prosecutors are now suing over the same practice.

• 🇻🇪 Venezuelan fintech Cashea raised US$100 million, one of the region’s biggest venture rounds of the year.

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

- AWS

👊 Jump into our language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Subscribe now

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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

BIS study says Brazil’s stablecoin crackdown is aimed at the wrong lever

A new Bank for International Settlements working paper casts doubt on Brazil’s stablecoin crackdown just as it ramps up.

The paper studied restrictions on foreign-currency deposits across more than 130 countries since 1990, and separately studied USDT and USDC flows across 184 countries since 2017.

The two behave completely differently under the same kind of rule: requiring authorization for foreign-currency accounts cut median dollarization from over 30% to about 5%, but an equivalent restriction had no statistically significant effect on stablecoin inflows, which kept moving at the same pace through public blockchains, offshore platforms and self-custody wallets regardless of the rule.

João Paulo Mayall, co-founder of QR Capital and the executive who led Latin America’s first Bitcoin ETF, QBTC11, put the finding bluntly:

“Restrictions on foreign-currency deposits work: median dollarization drops from 30% to 5%. Restrictions on stablecoins: the same inflow, with or without a ban.”

He drew a sharper line between what regulation can reach and what it can’t:

“A dollarized government, a dollarized company, and now the BIS documents the people dollarizing.”

The paper’s own authors reach a similar conclusion: banking-style rules have limited power over money that moves through a public blockchain rather than the banking system they were built to supervise.

Recall that Brazil’s Central Bank has spent the past month tightening exactly the kind of controls the BIS paper says don’t work on stablecoins, including:

• a freeze on FX operations tied to crypto-fund imports

• a proposed 24-hour hold on outbound transfers.

The research doesn’t say the rules are pointless, but it does suggest the bank may be squeezing the lever least likely to move the number it cares about.

You can see Mayall’s full thread on X/Twitter for more.

📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

B3 launches crypto derivatives and preps its own stablecoin

B3, Latin America’s largest stock exchange, began trading options on Bitcoin, Ether and Solana futures on July 6, expanding a regulated crypto derivatives shelf aimed at institutional investors and professional traders who want exposure and hedging tools without holding the underlying coins directly.

The options launch is one piece of a broader digital-asset build-out.

At the Expert XP conference, B3 said it plans to roll out its own real-pegged stablecoin, B3RL, in the coming months, alongside tokenized assets and 24/7 trading of financial products.

The exchange is betting that round-the-clock settlement and tokenized instruments become table stakes for capital markets infrastructure.

B3 also gave a concrete demonstration of tokenized real-world assets this month, structuring a rural credit operation backed by ten dairy cows valued at R$120,000 (more on that below).

The timing matters. Just as B3 leans into tokenized products, the CVM has drawn a sharp line over who is allowed to offer what, insisting that a Central Bank license does not by itself authorize tokenized equities or crypto derivatives.

B3, as a regulated exchange operating inside the securities perimeter, is arguably the best-positioned player in the country to move tokenized instruments to market without tripping over that line.

📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | Portal do Bitcoin | CoinDesk | CriptoInforme | Cointelegraph Brasil

Brazilian farmers turn dairy cows into blockchain collateral

Farmers in Paraná completed Brazil’s first livestock-backed loan registered on B3, tokenizing ten dairy cows to unlock R$100,000 (~US$20,000) in credit.

The deal was structured by agtech firm Cowmed and investment fund Target FIDC, with the tokenized herd valued at R$120,000.

Each cow wears an AI-powered smart collar that tracks health, behavior and location in real time, converting that data into an encrypted digital identity tied directly to the B3 credit agreement.

That digital identity prevents the same cow from being pledged as collateral twice, a live problem in rural lending where physical livestock is hard to verify and easy to double-count.

Cowmed already tracks roughly 100,000 dairy cows across more than 1,000 farms, with the tracked herd worth an estimated US$395 million.

The company expects up to 20% of that network to adopt tokenized financing, which could unlock as much as US$77.6 million in new agricultural credit if it scales.

📰 Sources: Valor International | Cointelegraph Brasil | CoinDesk

Worldcoin’s iris-scanning faces a regional reckoning

The eyeball-scanning project formerly known as Worldcoin is running into walls across the region.

In Colombia, the Superintendency of Industry and Commerce ordered the permanent closure of World Foundation’s operation, which paid users in crypto to have their irises scanned.

Days later in Brazil, São Paulo prosecutors filed a civil suit against Tools for Humanity, the company behind World ID, along with Amazon Web Services, over alleged abusive practices in collecting biometric iris data from consumers in the city. The suit seeks at least R$240 million in collective moral damages.

Both actions target the same core mechanism, paying people small sums of crypto in exchange for one of the most sensitive biometric identifiers a person has, and both reflect regulators’ growing discomfort with the trade. Brazil’s data protection authority had already restricted the practice earlier, and the São Paulo case now escalates it into the courts.

📰 Sources: Caracol Radio | Portal do Bitcoin

Mexico tops LatAm venture funding as investors pivot to stablecoins

Mexico-based startups raised US$944 million in Q2 2026, up 131% year over year and leading Latin America by a wide margin, with US firms like Andreessen Horowitz and Founders Fund driving the region’s largest deals, according to Crunchbase.

Brazil checked in at US$350 million, down 11% from a year earlier.

The crypto angle comes from QED Investors, which told Crunchbase that stablecoins, tokenization and digital assets have become a substantially larger share of its LatAm strategy than a few years ago, particularly at the infrastructure layer.

📰 Source: Crunchbase News

Liqi launches AI agent that has read 34 million CVM filings

Liqi launched a free public AI agent that reads and interprets the monthly filings that fund managers and securitization firms submit to the CVM, Brazil’s securities regulator.

The tool has processed 34 million filings across roughly 47,000 funds and operations — FIDCs, real estate funds, CRIs, CRAs, and liquid funds — covering more than R$1.3 trillion (~US$235 billion) in credit and real estate structures.

Reading the filings in series surfaced nearly 30,000 documents that were corrected after original publication, including 14,000 corrections initiated by administrators and 6,500 required by the regulator in FIDCs alone.

📰 Source: Valor

🗞 LatAm Rundown

🇧🇷 Brazil

• The IMF praised Brazil’s Pix system in a new financial stability report, highlighting it as a catalyst for inclusion and noting the accelerating growth of crypto operations in the country. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Supreme Court Justice Flavio Dino approved the NOVO party’s plan to restructure the CVM and strengthen its crypto oversight. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• São José dos Pinhais, in metropolitan Curitiba, created a “Bitcoin Cidadão” program letting residents pay municipal debts with crypto, with all conversion handled by accredited intermediaries. 📰 Source: Portal do Bitcoin

• A malware strain from Brazil hides its command infrastructure inside an Ethereum smart contract, letting operators swap servers without updating the code. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• RWAs in Brazil raised R$24.74 million in a week, down 13%, while the total market advanced to R$8.97 billion. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• DETRAN-BA expanded its use of blockchain to register auction lot documents, editals, and reports so participants can verify file integrity. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Fenasbac opened applications for Brazil’s largest financial-sector accelerator, seeking blockchain and AI startups working on derivatives, PayFi and autonomous payments. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• OranjeBTC launched Bitcoin.com.br, aiming to become the country’s largest Bitcoin hub. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• The town of Rolante advanced in the Chamber of Deputies toward becoming Brazil’s official “National Bitcoin Capital.” 📰 Source: Livecoins

• LBank brought crypto payments to Brazil via Pix, alongside a 100,000 USDT campaign. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Rise is betting on blockchain to cut costs and add transparency to tokenized private credit. 📰 Source: Portal do Bitcoin

• The STF denied release to a suspect accused of fraud involving fake crypto investments. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Magazine Luiza’s AI virtual seller “Lu” generated R$100 million over eight months on WhatsApp, serving 7.7 million users and tripling conversion versus other channels. 📰 Source: CPG

• Green hydrogen developers have waited 18 months for a regulatory decree that is holding up R$24.6 billion in tax incentives in Brazil. 📰 Source: CPG

• An Australian multinational plans a R$3.6 billion rare earths project in Bahia. 📰 Source: Estadão

🇦🇷 Argentina

• Economy Minister Federico Sturzenegger is accelerating Argentina’s crypto market, allowing funds to invest in digital assets and enabling asset tokenization as part of a capital markets modernization. 📰 Sources: El Economista | iProUP

• A new Chinese lithium giant is looking to invest in Argentina’s critical minerals sector. 📰 Source: El Cronista

🇻🇪 Venezuela

• Cashea, the Venezuelan digital financing fintech, raised US$100 million in global capital, one of the region’s biggest venture rounds of the year. CEO Pedro Vallenilla credited the Argentine expat community as central to the company’s growth. 📰 Sources: Infobae | Startups.com.br

• OKX launched a crypto card in Venezuela alongside a campaign giving 15 USDT to earthquake victims. 📰 Source: Yahoo

• Binance is preparing a crypto payments card for Venezuela and has begun requiring P2P merchants there to update their employment data. 📰 Sources: iProUP | CriptoNoticias

• Crypto donations poured into Venezuela after the earthquakes, with roughly US$3 million in USDT used as a lifeline. 📰 Source: MSN

🇨🇴 Colombia

• Colombia’s financial regulator, the SFC, strengthened oversight with new rules targeting crypto transfers. 📰 Source: CryptoRank

• Colombia is consolidating its position among Latin America’s leaders in AI regulation. 📰 Source: Portafolio

🇨🇱 Chile

• A deadly storm disrupted Chilean copper mines, raising fresh concerns about supply for AI-driven data center demand. 📰 Source: Financial Times

• Chile plans a US$100 billion copper push over the next decade to find buyers beyond China, as data center demand surges. 📰 Sources: Mining.com | Crypto Briefing

• Chile canceled the registration of a crypto fintech linked to the Tren de Aragua criminal group. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• Green hydrogen and data centers are converging in Chile as developers pair renewable power with compute. 📰 Source: BNamericas

🇸🇻 El Salvador

• Bitunix obtained a BSP license in El Salvador to offer regulated Bitcoin services. 📰 Source: Livecoins

🇲🇽 Mexico

• Bitso integrated Open USD, the stablecoin backed by Visa, BlackRock, Coinbase and more than 140 institutions. 📰 Source: CriptoTendencia

• Mexico and China are deepening scientific cooperation on AI, robotics and semiconductors. 📰 Source: Hoja de Ruta Digital

• Mexico and Canada are exploring an AI alliance, reviewing their 2025–2028 action plan amid trade tension over the USMCA. 📰 Source: Infobae

• Mexico invests 213 times less than the US in AI, but startups are finding openings in the gap. 📰 Source: Expansión

🇧🇴 Bolivia

• Bolivia began an independent audit of its Llipi lithium complex to strengthen future investment, while EU lawmakers explore cooperation on lithium and other critical minerals. 📰 Sources: Rumbo Minero | La Voz de Tarija

🇵🇪 Peru

• Argentina’s government is looking to Peru’s decades-old model of central bank autonomy as it drafts a reform to shield its own monetary authority. 📰 Source: El Cronista

• The Perú Blockchain Conference convened exchanges and Circle to discuss digital finance adoption across Peru and the wider region. 📰 Source: DiarioBitcoin

Greetings from Alexandria, Minnesota and welcome back to the Bits and Borders newsletter for the week of July 13-17.

I had a refreshing “working vacation” in the US the last couple weeks and will be back at full capacity in the next few days. I’ll be speaking at the Ai4 conference in Las Vegas on August 4-7 and then again at Blockchain Rio on August 12-13. I look forward to catching up with many of you soon!

In the meantime, let’s take a look at this week’s key stories:

• 🇧🇷 The CVM stands up a 60-day working group to draft an experimental framework for tokenized securities

• 🇧🇷 Trump’s tariff campaign against Brazil centers on Pix

• 🇻🇪 USDT trading in Venezuela now rivals the country’s national oil exports

• 🇦🇷 An Argentine federal judge froze 25 accounts tied to $LIBRA and ordered six exchanges to hand over KYC records

• 🇲🇽 Ricardo Salinas and Lyn Alden launched Orange Juice Holdings, a US$40 million bitcoin-treasury acquisition vehicle

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

- AWS

👊 Jump into our language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Subscribe now

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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

New Podcasts!

I caught up with El Dorado CEO Guillermo Goncalves at the Bitso Business Stablecoin Conference last month. we talked about El Dorado’s recent $9 million Series A funding around, its explosive growth in the Latam stablecoin remittance space and its expansion into the B2B realm.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

Brazil’s CVM gives itself 60 days to write the rules for tokenized stocks

Brazil’s securities regulator has established a Tokenization Working Group (GTT) tasked with proposing an experimental regulatory framework for the issuance, custody, trading and settlement of securities on distributed ledger infrastructure.

The group has 60 days to deliver its proposal to the CVM’s board, with an initial operating window of 120 days, extendable by 30.

The 14-member team is coordinated by José Alexandre Vasco of the CVM’s institutional modernization division and Bruno Gomes of its securitization and agribusiness division, and will study domestic and international sandbox experiences before making recommendations. The regulator’s framing left little doubt about how it sees the stakes:

“Tokenization represents a structural transformation of the capital markets and requires an equally innovative regulatory approach.”

Recall that the CVM stated flatly that a VASP license from Brazil’s Central Bank does not authorize any company to offer tokenized shares, crypto derivatives or futures trading in Brazil, drawing a hard jurisdictional line between the two regulators.

📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | Portal do Bitcoin | BlockNews | Valor

Trump’s tariff fight with Brazil takes aim at Pix

The US officially singled out Brazil’s Pix instant payment system as an “unfair trade practice” in its reasoning for imposing a 25% tariff on most Brazilian goods, which will take effect July 22.

The state-run instant payment system now handles more transactions in the country than credit and debit cards combined, and the US Trade Representative argued that Brazil’s practice of requiring financial institutions to offer it to customers free of charge disadvantages US credit card companies Mastercard and Visa.

The agency wrote on X.

“The Brazilian central bank encourages use of Pix over other services by mandating that participating institutions offer Pix for free to individuals and by capping the fee those institutions may charge businesses for Pix transactions.”

The overlooked backstory runs through Meta’s WhatsApp Pay, which was blocked by Brazil’s Central Bank in 2020 on competition and data privacy grounds. The WhatsApp Pay defeat became a case study in Washington’s argument that Brazil had tilted the field toward Pix and disadvantaged US firms.

Both Lula and Flavio Bolsonaro, his challenger in the October election, have defended Pix publicly against the international scrutiny. But realistically, Pix being operated as a state-run payment system that local financial institutions must offer to consumers at essentially no-cost is clearly prejudicial to US credit card networks that have been operating in the country, so this will be a tough one to overturn.

The most interesting angle here in my opinion is what US action means for instant payment systems in other countries like India, Colombia and elsewhere. Will all of these be fair game to be targeted as unfair? I suspect we’ll find out soon enough.

📰 Sources: CoinDesk | Cointelegraph Brasil | BeInCrypto Brasil

In Venezuela, USDT trading now rivals the nation’s oil exports

Venezuela transacts an estimated US$44 million per day in USDT through Binance P2P alone, according to Ecoanalítica, putting the value of USDT commerce in the same league as the country’s national crude exports.

The stablecoin has become the de facto settlement layer for an economy where the bolívar keeps losing ground. USDT broke through 800 bolívares this week, another marker in a long slide that has pushed importers, merchants and ordinary savers into dollar-denominated tokens as a matter of survival rather than speculation.

📰 Sources: CriptoNoticias | CryptoRank | CriptoNoticias

Ricardo Salinas and Lyn Alden launch a bitcoin-treasury acquisition vehicle

Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas (chairman of Grupo Salinas and already a well-known bitcoin advocate with 70% of his liquid portfolio in BTC) has teamed up with prominent bitcoin investor Lyn Alden to launch Orange Juice Holdings, a Westport, Connecticut-based vehicle that raised US$40 million in an initial private funding round.

The strategy is to acquire profitable small and mid-sized businesses generating US$1 million to US$10 million in annual free cash flow, then use the surplus cash those businesses throw off to build a permanent bitcoin treasury. Unlike a traditional private equity fund, which restructures and resells companies within four to seven years, Orange Juice plans to hold what it buys indefinitely, and is eyeing an eventual public listing to raise capital without ever having to sell its bitcoin.

Salinas framed it as a natural extension of how he already runs his businesses:

“I have built a diversified conglomerate... Orange Juice is based on both: cash-flowing businesses and a bitcoin treasury.”

📰 Sources: CriptoNoticias | Bitcoin.com News

🗞 LatAm Rundown

🇧🇷 Brazil

• Foxbit now accounts for more than 41% of the digital dollar traded in Brazil and is repositioning as full financial infrastructure for banks and fintechs. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Brazil’s government launched a plan against organized crime that flags the illicit use of crypto as a growing concern. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• A proposed legal framework for Brazil’s decentralized electricity market could incorporate blockchain, connecting the crypto and energy pillars in one bill. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Atlas Inc. launched a tech asset manager focused on AI and tokenization, naming Marcelo Nantes, former CIO of Bradesco Asset, as CEO. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Brazil’s Justice Ministry is investigating 32 sites generating fake AI nudity images and charging crypto payments to unlock high-resolution material. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Coopfy, a Brazilian digital-asset infrastructure startup founded by Fernando Zanatta, launched a platform unifying banking operations, asset management, payments and compliance for banks and crypto firms. 📰 Source: BeInCrypto Brasil

• Congressman Kim Kataguiri filed a request for the Finance Ministry to disclose how much tax the government has collected from crypto, along with volume, investor counts and fine data. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Cirion began construction of its second data center in Rio de Janeiro. 📰 Source: BNamericas

• Trade Minister Márcio Elias Rosa revealed the US pushed Brazil during tariff talks to adopt limits on investment from “non-market-oriented actors” in critical minerals, mirroring deals struck with the UK and Australia. Brazil refused, arguing the country’s rare earths and critical minerals belong to Brazilians and that it won’t cede autonomy over its mineral policy. 📰 Source: InfoMoney

• Brazil’s Senate created a cross-party Parliamentary Front on Artificial Intelligence, Data Protection and Digital Security, formalized by Senate President Davi Alcolumbre. It has no dedicated budget but will hold hearings and seminars on AI regulation and push Brazil to align with OECD, G20 and UN AI norms. 📰 Source: Poder360

• Ceará’s state assembly approved a regulatory framework for data centers and battery storage systems, classifying data centers into five tiers by power draw (from micro at under 20 MW to exceptional above 500 MW); the state is marketing roughly 2,800 MW of surplus renewable generation to attract projects like the planned TikTok data complex at Pecém. 📰 Source: DatacenterDynamics

🇦🇷 Argentina

• A federal judge froze 25 accounts linked to the $LIBRA investigation and ordered six exchanges, including Binance, Bybit, OKX, CoinEx, FixedFloat and Bitfinex, to hand over KYC records, IP logs and linked bank accounts as prosecutors trace funds from the token promoted by President Milei. 📰 Sources: Diario Bitcoin | BeInCrypto Brasil

• Tether put US$20 million into Argentine neobank Ualá as part of a US$197 million round that valued the fintech at US$3.2 billion; Ualá now counts more than 11 million clients across the region. 📰 Sources: CriptoInforme | CriptoTendencia

• Argentina excluded Russia’s Rosatom from developing the Tolillar lithium deposit as the country joins Pax Silica, a US-led alliance meant to secure Western critical-minerals supply chains and cut dependence on China; membership opens the door to preferential financing from Western banks and funds for Argentina’s lithium, copper and rare-earths projects. 📰 Source: www1.ru

• Circle partnered with Argentine financial group Grupo BIND to bring institutional USDC access through BIND’s digital-assets platform BEN, a regulated CNV-registered virtual asset provider, directly challenging Tether’s dominance in a country with some of the world’s highest per-capita stablecoin usage. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• Chinese miner Zijin Mining, through subsidiary Liex, won approval under Argentina’s RIGI investment regime for a US$709 million lithium carbonate plant at the Tres Quebradas salt flat in Catamarca, with capacity for 40,000 tons a year.. 📰 Source: El Cronista

🇨🇴 Colombia

• Colombia’s tax authority, the DIAN, will require crypto users to keep purchase receipts, prices, dates and wallet-to-wallet transfer records so it can verify the real cost basis of holdings. Crypto platforms must report transactions over 50,000 pesos starting in 2026, with the first filing due by the last business day of May 2027. 📰 Source: Portafolio

🇨🇱 Chile

• Chile’s antitrust regulator approved a partnership between state miner Enami and Rio Tinto to extract lithium in the Atacama salt flats. 📰 Source: BioBioChile

• Codelco postponed the start of its Maricunga lithium project to 2034. 📰 Source: Chile País Minero

• Solar developer Solaer entered the data center market with a project in Chile. 📰 Source: Data Center Dynamics

🇲🇽 Mexico

• Rappi will start a crypto-payments pilot in Mexico. 📰 Source: El Sol de México

🇵🇪 Peru

• Lemon enabled the purchase of US stocks from US$1 in Peru, offering access to more than 10,000 companies with regulated custody through Alpaca. 📰 Source: CriptoTendencia

• Elemental Royalty acquired a stake in Quilla Resources and a royalty over a Peru copper project. 📰 Source: Mining Weekly

🇧🇴 Bolivia

• Bolivia is moving to formally recognize USDT amid a deepening dollar shortage, with state and private banks including Banco Unión, Banco FIE and Banco BISA already offering their own USDT products. 📰 Sources: Cointelegraph | CriptoInforme

🇸🇻 El Salvador

• A new platform launched in El Salvador lets users invest from US$10 in US stocks and crypto. 📰 Source: Infobae

Guillermo Goncalvez is CEO of El Dorado. I caught up with him at Bitso’s Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City last month to discuss El Dorado’s new $9 million Series A round and its expansion into B2B payments.

El Dorado’s move into business accounts signals a broader shift as consumer-first stablecoin apps in Latin America start building infrastructure for the small and medium-sized businesses that traditional banks have largely ignored.

The raise also lands as Goncalvez, who is Venezuelan, sees renewed international investor interest in Venezuela’s financial sector after years of isolation.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Subscribe now

Bits & 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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

Key takeaways:

• El Dorado closed a $9 million Series A led by Paradigm, with Coinbase Ventures also participating.

• The round funds El Dorado’s expansion into a B2B product, giving businesses virtual dollar accounts for global operations, particularly useful for import and export companies.

• Latin America’s cross-border payment market is worth close to $800 billion annually, and about 60% of that is B2B, mostly imports and exports.

• El Dorado’s consumer app already serves over a million users across 12 Latin American countries and ranks among the top 10 most downloaded financial apps in Bolivia.

• The company is cutting remittance fees by up to 80-90% on underserved corridors like Brazil-to-Bolivia and Argentina-to-Bolivia, charging around 1% compared to the 10-12% spreads charged through traditional channels.

• El Dorado is building its B2B infrastructure on Tempo, a payments-focused blockchain built by veterans of Stripe and Paradigm, which Goncalvez says will let the company automate more of its payment flows over time.

I enjoyed this conversation with Guillermo and I hope you do as well. You can connect with him on Linkedin.

Have a great weekend everybody

-AWS

Recent Episodes

Welcome back to Bits and Borders for the week of July 6-10.

I’m back in my beautiful home state of Minnesota for the week. Got to spend some time on Lake Minnetonka which is an absolute must-visit if you ever pass through here.

It’s a sprawling, island-dotted lake just outside Minneapolis, with more than 100 miles of shoreline, historic estates, sailboats, wooded coves, old-money villages, and a summer culture built around boating, swimming, lakeside restaurants, and sunset cruises.

For this newsletter, I’m continuing to expand out my coverage of frontier technology themes in addition to digital assets. An area I’ve become increasingly interested in is mining (physical mining, not just bitcoin mining).

The conversation around rare earths and critical minerals in Brazil and Latin America has been heating up significantly this year, and these materials are the underlying foundation for technology development in the region so I’ve decided to incorporate some more coverage of these.

I’m also continuing to include more content on AI, data centers, energy, etc. that is also relevant to the technology conversation in the region. Please let me know if you find this useful!

This week’s top stories:

• 🇧🇷 Tether invested R$100 million (~US$18 million) in Mercado Bitcoin to fund its tokenization and payments push

• 🇧🇷 B3, Latin America’s biggest exchange, launched options on bitcoin, ethereum and solana futures

• 🇧🇷 Itaú joined 17 global banks testing Swift’s blockchain-based ledger for round-the-clock cross-border payments

• 🇪🇺🇧🇷 The Mercosur-EU trade deal is putting stablecoin settlement costs and speed in focus for banks and corporates

• 🇧🇷 Lula convened a new rare earths council and dared Trump to “start worrying about Brazil” amid US tariff talks

• 🇨🇱 Eni took a 25% stake in EnergyX’s Black Giant lithium project in Chile for up to US$225 million

• 🇦🇷 Nexo launched what it bills as the world’s first dual debit-and-credit crypto card in Argentina

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

- AWS

👊 Jump into our language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Subscribe now

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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

New Podcasts!

Brazilian stablecoin infrastructure provider Trace Finance announced last month a $32 million Series A round led by CoinFund, with Coinbase Ventures, Jump, Paxos, and others participating.

I caught up with co-founders Bernardo Brites and Rafael Luz at the Bitso Business Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City in June to discuss their plans to launch what they say will be the largest Brazilian real-backed stablecoin.

We also discuss how Brazil’s new VASP regulation reshapes the competitive landscape for crypto companies doing cross-border payments. Worth a listen!

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

Tether Takes a Stake in Mercado Bitcoin

USDT issuer Tether has made a R$100 million (~US$18 million) investment in Mercado Bitcoin. The capital will go toward expanding the platform’s tokenization, payments, credit, and blockchain capital markets operations.

The deal is the first close of a larger round that also includes Mercado Bitcoin’s founders and SoftBank, which has been a shareholder since the company’s 2021 unicorn round. Mercado Bitcoin did not disclose the total size of the round, the valuation, or the size of the stake Tether acquired.

Tether has spent the last two years deploying its enormous reserve profits into companies building blockchain-based financial rails, and Mercado Bitcoin, with its regulated exchange, tokenization arm, and capital markets ambitions, fits that thesis cleanly. It also deepens Tether’s footprint in a market where USDT is already the dominant on-ramp for retail and institutional flows alike.

Paolo Ardoino, CEO of Tether, framed the deal as consistent with the company’s broader strategy of backing firms building on-chain financial infrastructure. He said:

“Mercado Bitcoin has built a regulated and integrated platform for on-chain financial services that serves millions of users in one of the most dynamic financial markets in the world.”

📰 Source: Valor

Itaú To Participate in Swift’s First Blockchain Payments Pilot

Swift has selected 17 banks across six continents to test its new blockchain-based ledger for cross-border payments, and Itaú is the only Brazilian institution on the list.

The system lets tokenized deposits move across borders on a 24/7 basis, and the pilot marks Swift’s first live use case for the technology since it was announced last year.

Other participating banks include Citi, HSBC, BNP Paribas, Standard Chartered, UBS, MUFG, and Wells Fargo. The ledger was built in nine months based on feedback from the participating institutions.

Swift said the framework is designed to let tokenized value move with the speed and flexibility of modern commerce while keeping the security and compliance standards of the traditional financial system. Thierry Chilosi, Swift’s VP of business, said in a statement:

“We are extending the trust and stability of the traditional financial system to the frontiers of digital money.”

📰 Source: Valor

B3 Launches Options on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana futures

Brazil’s B3 stock exchange began trading options on Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Solana futures contracts, expanding its regulated crypto derivatives lineup.

The new options settle into the underlying futures rather than the assets themselves, with exercise automatically triggering a position in the respective futures contract at the pre-set price. Trading runs from 9am to 6:30pm, and market makers will be on hand to support liquidity and price formation.

Rafael Tsopanoglou Teodoro, B3’s head of currency products, framed the launch as filling a gap for professional traders who want exposure with better hedging tools. He said:

“The advance of crypto derivatives creates new possibilities for traders, managers, and investors seeking exposure to this asset class with adequate risk management instruments.”

📰 Source: Valor

Mercosur-EU Trade Deal Could Open the Door to Stablecoin Settlement

The trade agreement between the European Union and Mercosur is likely to intensify scrutiny of how much cross-border payments between the two blocs cost and how long they take, creating an opening for stablecoins in conversations among banks and corporates, according to Stijn Vander Straeten, CEO of Crypto Finance Group, the digital asset arm of Deutsche Börse Group.

Traditional cross-border payment rails between Latin America and Europe can eat up 3% to 6% of transaction value, Vander Straeten told Valor, and stablecoins could serve as a faster and cheaper settlement layer as trade volumes climb.

He was careful to note that this does not push banks out of the picture, since trust and operational support around a shipment still have to come from somewhere. He said:

“I don’t think a soy producer in Argentina is simply going to take stablecoins directly from the buyer in Europe. Someone needs to guarantee the shipment.”

He also flagged the political dimension. If governments in the region allow stablecoins to circulate freely, he expects demand to skew toward dollar- and euro-denominated tokens rather than local-currency ones. He said:

“It will be very interesting to see if countries will open up or try to limit the free flow of stablecoins. If you open up, many people in Latin America will probably tend to use dollar or euro stablecoins, not the local currency.”

That tension between capital-flow control and payment efficiency is the real story inside the Mercosur-EU deal’s crypto angle. A cheaper rail that also accelerates dollarization is not an easy thing for a central bank to wave through.

📰 Source: Valor

Eni Takes 25% of EnergyX’s Black Giant Lithium Project in Chile for US$225M

Italy’s Eni will invest up to US$225 million to acquire a 25% stake in the Black Giant lithium project in Chile owned by US startup EnergyX, in a deal advised by BBVA.

The investment gives the Italian energy major a foothold in the Atacama’s lithium triangle and marks one of the larger foreign commitments to Chilean lithium this year.

Black Giant relies on direct lithium extraction technology, which pulls lithium from brine without spreading it across the large evaporation ponds that have defined traditional Atacama production. Eni is betting the approach can scale with a smaller water and land footprint, a growing point of friction with Indigenous communities and regulators in northern Chile.

The move fits a broader pattern of energy and industrial players moving upstream into battery raw materials rather than sourcing them on the open market. Eni is already a partner of YPF in Argentina LNG, giving it exposure across two of the region’s most important resource plays.

The deal lands as Chilean lithium is having its strongest year since the last cycle peak. Lithium export values topped US$3.2 billion in the first half of 2026, nearly tripling year-on-year on the back of a price rebound and firm demand.

📰 Sources: WSJ | pv magazine | Reporte Minero | Ámbito | Mining Weekly

Lula Creates a Rare Earths Council and Dares Trump to “Start Worrying About Brazil”

President Lula convened his ministers to hammer out a national policy for rare earths and critical minerals, creating a new council to coordinate the effort as Brazil negotiates its way out of US tariffs.

Brazil holds the world’s second-largest rare earth reserves but accounts for just 1% of global production, a gap Lula framed as the country’s biggest untapped strategic card.

He wasn’t subtle about the geopolitics. Lula said China is “obsessed” with being the only country that holds rare earth processing knowledge, that Trump is “envious” of the Chinese, and that Washington should take notice. He said:

“Trump can start worrying about Brazil.”

Brazil’s chief trade negotiator went further, saying rare earths and critical minerals are the single Washington interest capable of unlocking a deal on the tariffs.

Mines and Energy Minister Alexandre Silveira cited the Serra Verde operation while defending state “control” over the sector, and a government wing is pushing for rigorous screening of foreign investors, with some voices favoring restrictions on foreign capital altogether.

Lula sees Vale as a key player in getting the industry off the ground, and said the government would create dedicated rare earth research institutes if the country lacks the labs to analyze the deposits.

The policy debate is running ahead of the legislation. A critical minerals bill remains stalled in the Senate, and the internal split between those who want strict state control and those who want to attract capital is unresolved.

📰 Sources: O Globo | Valor | G1 | UOL | CNN Brasil | O Tempo | Exame

AI Boom Drives Taiwan’s Exports to Mexico Up 233%

Taiwanese imports into Mexico surged 233% on the back of the artificial intelligence buildout, according to Forbes México. The jump reflects Mexico’s position in the AI hardware supply chain, as servers, semiconductors, and data center components flow through the country’s manufacturing base to serve North American demand.

The figure underscores how the physical infrastructure of the AI era, not just the software layer, is reshaping trade flows across the region. For Mexico, the nearshoring story that began with autos and electronics is now extending to the compute hardware powering AI, with Taiwan as one of the primary suppliers.

📰 Source: Forbes México

🗞 LatAm Rundown

🇧🇷 Brazil

• The Receita Federal has charged R$54 million and collected R$8.3 million in fines for omissions, errors and delays in crypto reporting between 2020 and April 2026. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• The Receita is expanding crypto oversight with artificial intelligence to cross-reference data and flag filings inconsistent with a taxpayer’s financial reality. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Federal Police launched Operation Véu de Maia, targeting 87 companies suspected of acting as fronts for illegal betting operators and moving proceeds abroad through crypto. 📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | BlockNews

• NovaDAX shut down its crypto trading in Brazil, striking a deal with Foxbit to migrate its clients. 📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | BeInCrypto Brasil

• Coins.xyz, the international arm of Philippine platform Coins.ph, plans to apply for a VASP license in Brazil to operate as a broker and custody provider, CEO Wei Zhou said. 📰 Source: BlockNews

• Brazil’s tokenized real-world asset market has now accumulated R$9.96 billion (~US$1.8 billion) across 5,593 tokenized assets, per RWA Monitor data. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• The CGU and Federal Police froze R$9 million in crypto during Operation Reduto, tied to a kickback scheme involving public servants in Rondônia. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• The central bank ordered the liquidation of Sefer Investimentos, a securities distributor linked to the Banco Master case. 📰 Source: BeInCrypto Brasil

• Aécio Neves introduced a bill to ban the use of cryptocurrencies in online betting in Brazil. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Binance’s Brazil operation obtained ISO/IEC 27001 and 27701 certifications for information security and privacy. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• A single large data center can add R$1.5 billion (~US$280 million) to Brazil’s GDP, according to a study by FGV. 📰 Source: UOL Economia

• SENAI Cimatec, Hytron and Petrogal Brasil inaugurated Bahia’s first green hydrogen pilot plant. 📰 Source: Sistema FIEB

• Ceará is bringing together seven companies and R$66 billion (~US$12 billion) to turn the Pecém complex into Brazil’s largest green hydrogen hub, with final investment decisions expected by the end of 2026. 📰 Source: CPG Click Oil and Gas

• Energy storage batteries were added to Brazil’s Plano Safra, bringing agribusiness closer to the energy transition. 📰 Source: Exame

• A shortage of specialized professionals is emerging in Brazil as AI adoption accelerates. 📰 Source: Exame

• A second rare-earth-linked fund has listed on the B3 exchange in under a month, with Global X launching ETFs targeting rare earths and AI in Brazil. 📰 Sources: CNN Brasil | Capital Aberto

• Brazil’s Tiros rare earth and titanium project received a preliminary economic assessment, advancing one of the country’s early-stage rare earth developments. 📰 Source: Industrial Info Resources

• Lara Exploration is advancing toward a roughly US$1 billion copper test in Brazil, per Mining.com. 📰 Source: Mining.com

🇦🇷 Argentina

• Nexo launched the Nexo Card in Argentina, which it bills as the world’s first crypto card with a dual debit-and-credit mode, letting users either spend their crypto or borrow against it without selling. The launch coincided with the appointment of Andrés Ondarra as General Manager of Nexo Argentina, effective August 1. 📰 Sources: CriptoInforme | Ámbito

• The government eliminated the “cheque tax” on cryptocurrency and other digital operations, exempting a range of transactions from the levy. 📰 Source: Infobae

• Argentina’s securities regulator, the CNV, is accelerating a tokenization framework aimed at a market it pegs at US$16 trillion. 📰 Source: iProUP

• Argentine mining output hit its highest level since 2017 in May, with lithium production jumping nearly 50%, driven alongside Vaca Muerta’s oil and gas expansion. 📰 Sources: El Economista | Infobae

• Argentina wants to become an AI and data center player, but analysts say the RIGI investment incentive regime has so far been a “technological desert” for the sector, failing to draw compute infrastructure. 📰 Sources: Letra P | Perfil

• Argentina is seeking a deeper partnership with India across agriculture, critical minerals, and energy, per The Economic Times. 📰 Source: The Economic Times

🇨🇱 Chile

• Pomelo expanded its Chile footprint, launching a loyalty product and deepening its stablecoin push in the region. 📰 Source: TipRanks

• The SQM-Codelco joint venture is targeting a 70% increase in lithium production in Chile, according to Seeking Alpha, a major expansion of the state-backed partnership in the Atacama. 📰 Source: Seeking Alpha

• Chilean lithium exports topped US$3.2 billion in the first half of 2026, the best figure since 2023, nearly tripling year-on-year on higher prices and strong demand. 📰 Sources: Mining.com | La Tercera | Minería en Línea

• Chile is positioning itself as the region’s leading data center hub but faces the challenge of scaling infrastructure to meet AI-era compute demand, per ITSitio. 📰 Source: ITSitio

🇨🇴 Colombia

• Colombia’s Superintendency of Industry and Commerce ordered the definitive shutdown of World Foundation, the Worldcoin-linked project that paid crypto for iris scans. 📰 Source: Caracol Radio

• Digital dollars now account for 46% of all crypto transactions in Colombia, according to abceconomia.co. 📰 Source: abceconomia.co

• Colombia updated its anti-money-laundering controls, with new implications for how crypto firms report. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• AI adoption is intensifying competition for the data center business in Colombia, with providers racing to build capacity, per Portafolio. 📰 Source: Portafolio

🇵🇪 Peru

• Peru rushed to regulate AI but has frozen its bitcoin legislation, according to CriptoNoticias. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• Economist Hernando de Soto proposed using blockchain to convert Peru’s informal-sector assets into productive capital. 📰 Source: CriptoTendencia

• Peruvian lithium developer American Lithium welcomed a “mining positive” presidential election outcome, signaling optimism for its Falchani and Macusani projects. 📰 Source: Mining Weekly

• Peru’s government is betting on lithium and uranium to position the country in the energy transition. 📰 Source: Rumbo Minero

🇻🇪 Venezuela

• USDT broke the 800 bolívar barrier as the parallel exchange rate continued to slide. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• OKX launched a free Visa Platinum card in Venezuela for USDT and USDC payments and announced a campaign giving 15 USDT to 2,000 users in the wake of the recent earthquakes. 📰 Source: CriptoInforme

• Binance Charity pledged US$3 million in USDT vouchers and waived P2P and Binance Pay fees for seven days for users in earthquake-hit areas of Venezuela. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• OKX and the Universidad Católica Andrés Bello teamed up to support earthquake victims in Venezuela. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• Venezuela handed its tax authority to a self-described “crypto expert,” raising the prospect of closer scrutiny of USDT flows. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

🇲🇽 Mexico

• A ruling-party proposal to regulate artificial intelligence is advancing in Mexico’s Congress, laying out an early framework for AI governance. 📰 Source: ITSitio

🇧🇴 Bolivia

• The fate of Bolivia’s lithium contracts with China and Russia now rests with the country’s Constitutional Court, which will decide whether the deals can proceed. 📰 Source: Opinión Bolivia

🇵🇾 Paraguay

• Paraguay convicted two people for stealing electricity to power a crypto mining operation. 📰 Source: Livecoins

🇸🇻 El Salvador

• El Salvador says artificial intelligence is already part of the daily routine in its public schools. 📰 Source: Livecoins

🌎 Regional / LatAm

• Fireblocks hired Guilherme Quintino as Strategic Customer Director for Latin America. 📰 Source: BeInCrypto Brasil

Bernardo Brites and Rafael Luz are co-founders of Trace Finance, a Brazilian cross-border payments infrastructure company.

I caught up with them at Bitso Business’ Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City last month to discuss the company’s $32 million Series A and the launch of a BRL-backed stablecoin.

Trace Finance has been building stablecoin rails for Brazil since 2019, long before the current wave of cross-border payment startups. The timing of their raise reflects growing investor conviction in the Latam corridor and a regulatory environment that is pushing serious volume toward licensed, bank-backed operators.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Subscribe now

Bits & 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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

Read the Report!

Key takeaways from this episode

• Trace Finance closed a $32 million Series A led by CoinFund, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Jump, Paxos, the founder of Solana, and Toly, founder of Circle, and others.

• The company is launching what it says will be the largest BRL-backed stablecoin, designed to give global companies access to Brazilian real for the first time without navigating Brazil’s strict capital controls.

• Brazil’s new PSAV regulation caps VASP-licensed crypto companies at $100,000 per cross-border transaction, effectively locking them out of large corporate flows. This is a structural advantage for Trace, which operates under a bank-adjacent structure with no transaction cap.

• The BRL stablecoin could cut FX costs for small and mid-sized importers and exporters from 300 basis points to as low as 2 basis points by pooling volume that currently sits fragmented across individual companies.

• Trace is already processing payments for some of Brazil’s largest e-commerce, streaming, travel, and mobility players, and recently joined the Mastercard Start Path program as it targets global PSPs and enterprise clients.

• The co-founders see the future of cross-border stablecoins as a loss-leader that drives customers toward higher-margin products like credit and yield, the same playbook traditional banks have used for decades with trade finance.

I enjoyed this conversation with Bernardo and Rafael and I hope you do as well. You can connect with both of them on Linkedin.

Have a great weekend everybody.

-AWS

Recent Episodes

Greetings from South Dakota and welcome back to Bits and Borders for June 28 - July 3, 2026.

I’m in the US for a few weeks and managed to do a fun a roadtrip out to the Black Hills. This place is absolutely incredible - some of the most stunning scenes I’ve ever seen anywhere. Have a look at the photos below and you’ll probably agree.

We made stops at the Badlands National Park, Mount Rushmore, Sturgis (I’m not into motorcycles but had to at least check it out), and even caught a Fourth of July parade in Deadwood, which is the archetype late 1800s Gold Rush boomtown.

You’ll notice in this week’s edition that I’m continuing to expand out coverage into new “frontier tech” areas as they pertain to Latin America. You’ll see some content on AI, energy, data centers, etc below.

If you find this valuable or if there’s other relevant contents you’d like included in these reports I’d appreciate any feedback you might have.

No new podcast episodes this week, but please check out some of my recent episodes with Robson Silva of Pods and Ezra Kebrab of Caliza on YouTube or Spotify if you haven’t already. This week I’ll be pushing out a few more episodes from the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City last month so keep an eye out for those.

This week’s top stories:

• 🇧🇷 Itaú, Bradesco and Mercado Livre join a 140-company consortium behind Open USD, a new dollar stablecoin

• 🇧🇷 Brazil’s Central Bank reclassifies crypto exchanges as financial institutions

• 🇧🇷 The Central Bank tells Congress stablecoins are a “monetary instrument”

• 🇧🇷 Brazilian authorities freeze R$10.4 billion (~US$1.9 billion) in a PCC-linked, US-sanctioned laundering network

• 🇧🇷 ByteDance picks Brazil for its largest data center outside China

• 🌎 Stablecoins now make up over 80% of Brazil’s declared crypto volume, with Tether holding ~90%

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

- AWS

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Subscribe now

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.

Some of the key global highlights include:

• Crypto firms are moving away from ‘growth at all costs’, with 74% now prioritizing verification accuracy over user onboarding speed (39%).

• Despite fraud rates remaining flat at 2.2% from 2024 to 2025, crypto firms operate in a structurally riskier environment where targeted, automated and AI-driven attacks are the new normal.

• Over half (55%) of surveyed companies confirmed they experienced fraud at least once in 2025, with 15% unsure if it happened or not–emphasizing the lag between detection capabilities and growing fraud sophistication.

  Read the Report!

Itaú, Bradesco and Mercado Livre back the new OpenUSD stablecoin

Two of Brazil’s largest banks and its biggest e-commerce player are joining a global push to build a shared dollar stablecoin.

Itaú, Bradesco, Mercado Libre and Mercado Pago are among the Brazilian names in a consortium of more than 140 companies backing Open USD, a dollar-backed token set to launch before year-end.

The international roster reads like a who’s-who: Visa, Mastercard, Stripe, Coinbase, BlackRock, BNY, Google, Shopify, Fireblocks, Ripple, Solana and Polygon.

What makes Open USD different is the structure. It’s operated by Open Standard, a newly created company designed to run shared stablecoin infrastructure. Unlike existing stablecoins issued by a single company, the model lets corporate partners issue and redeem the token directly, without fees or volume caps.

Before getting too excited about this, it’s worth noting that cracks have already begun to emerge in this Open USD consortium. Notably, many of the Korean firms listed as partners in the project have stated publicly that they had no official discussions with Open Standard and were surprised to see their names included in the news release.

📰 Sources: Valor | Cointelegraph Brasil

Brazil Reclassifies Crypto Exchanges as Financial Institutions

Brazil’s Central Bank published Resolution 580, folding crypto exchanges into the same prudential framework that already governs brokerages and securities dealers - covering risk management, capital requirements and disclosure.

The rules take effect January 1, 2027, with a transition period running through June 30, 2028.

The bank also closed off an easier path: crypto platforms are barred from the simplified licensing tier reserved for the smallest financial institutions, saying the business is “incompatible with that profile.”

Companies already face an October deadline to get licensed, and the bank has made clear that means being fully compliant by then, not just starting the process.

An unnamed industry executive told Valor the “same risk, same regulation” logic doesn’t hold here, since crypto platforms don’t carry the same systemic risk as investment distributors:

“The positive is that it only takes effect in 2027, so we have time to adjust.”

There’s a real question of attrition here. Several exchanges have already headed for the exits this quarter, with NovaDAX winding down Brazilian trading and Satori Finance announcing it would close.

Carlos Russo, CEO of Bloquo and a coordinator at ABToken, expects the new rule to raise compliance costs, act as a market filter, and accelerate consolidation through mergers and acquisitions.

The industry is now waiting on a complementary rule detailing sector-specific risk factors, currently out for public comment. Russo put the real test plainly:

“The challenge now will be calibrating the day-to-day supervision so that it doesn’t end up strangling technological innovation.”

📰 Sources: Valor | CriptoInforme | Portal do Bitcoin

Brazil’s Central Bank tells Congress stablecoins are a “monetary instrument”

At a Chamber of Deputies hearing on Tuesday, Brazil’s Central Bank staked out a position that would reshape how stablecoins are regulated in the country.

Fábio Araújo, a consultant in the bank’s financial regulation department, argued that stablecoins used for payments should be treated not as virtual assets but as a form of money.

Opening the debate on the country’s pending stablecoin bill, he drew a sharp line between bitcoin and dollar- or real-pegged tokens. With bitcoin, he said, “the token is the asset itself.” A stablecoin is something else:

“The stablecoin should be considered a real-world asset and, more precisely, when presenting characteristics compatible with payment instruments, should be understood as a form of monetary instrument.”

The distinction is not academic. If stablecoins are money, they fall squarely under the Central Bank’s authority rather than being treated as virtual assets under the broader crypto framework.

ABCripto, an industry lobby group, fired back with a technical note to both the bank and Congress arguing that stablecoins should retain their legal nature as virtual assets, with prudential safeguards tailored to the sector.

The other flashpoint is the bank’s proposal to let firms hold stablecoin transactions for up to 24 hours before releasing funds to users, with comments due July 2. ABCripto asked the bank to shelve it entirely, and ABToken proposed the 24-hour window function as a maximum review period for high-risk operations rather than an automatic freeze on legitimate transfers.

📰 Sources: Valor | Portal do Bitcoin

Brazilian police freezes R$10.4 billion in PCC-linked laundering case

The Federal Police in Brazil launched Operation Exchange targeting a criminal organization accused of using crypto to launder drug trafficking proceeds.

Authorities froze more than R$10.4 billion (~US$1.9 billion) in assets and crypto holdings and arrested a target who had also been sanctioned by the United States.

The case ties back to the PCC, Brazil’s most powerful criminal faction. Days earlier, the US Treasury sanctioned two Brazilians and four companies over the use of cryptocurrencies to move drug money between the US and Brazil. One of them, Victor Henrique de Oliveira Shimada, had reportedly told associates he was worried American authorities were tracing his wallets.

The operation caps a quarter in which drug-trafficking and money laundering has become the dominant crypto crime typology in Brazil, according to a Chainalysis report last month.

📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | Livecoins | Portal do Bitcoin

ByteDance picks Brazil for its largest data center outside China

TikTok’s parent company ByteDance has chosen Brazil for what will be its largest data center complex outside of China, according to Bloomberg.

The decision plants one of the world’s most valuable private tech companies firmly in the middle of Brazil’s data center boom, and it’s a notable vote of confidence in the country’s power grid and connectivity infrastructure at a moment when AI-driven compute demand is reshaping where hyperscalers build.

ByteDance’s arrival is the kind of anchor tenant that pulls in adjacent investment in power, cooling and fiber. The open question, as always, is energy: these facilities are enormous electricity consumers, and Brazil’s ability to feed them with reliable, ideally renewable, power is what will determine whether the country becomes a durable data center hub or a one-cycle destination.

📰 Sources: Bloomberg Línea Brasil | Bloomberg

🗞 LatAm News Rundown

🇧🇷 Brazil

• Stablecoins now account for more than 80% of Brazil’s monthly declared crypto volume, with Tether holding roughly 90% of the stablecoin market, according to Receita Federal data covering August 2019 to December 2025. 📰 Sources: BlockNews | Portal do Bitcoin

• Brazilian spending on cryptocurrencies reached US$2.6 billion, more than doubling in a year. 📰 Source: Portal do Bitcoin

• The CVM, Brazil’s securities regulator, said a Central Bank license does not authorize crypto companies to offer tokenized shares, crypto derivatives or futures trading, stating that no crypto firm currently holds that authorization in Brazil. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Industry specialists said the new prudential rules will squeeze smaller platforms while pushing the market toward convergence with traditional finance. Bruno Samora, chief product officer of Matera, called it a turning point, predicting Brazilians will soon manage traditional money, stablecoins, tokenized assets and crypto within a single bank account and app. 📰 Source: Valor

• ABToken named Vanessa Butalla, VP of legal, compliance and regulation at Mercado Bitcoin, as president of its board, replacing Jorge Galvão of Droom Digital. She said:

“The market is going through a decisive phase of maturation and regulation, and I believe ABToken has a relevant role in this process.” 📰 Source: Valor

• A bill in Congress seeks to authorize ICO-style offerings in Brazil by recognizing digital contracts, corporate tokenization and equity-linked digital assets, though it would not exempt public offerings from CVM rules. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• NovaDAX ended crypto trading, telling clients to withdraw funds. 📰 Source: Portal do Bitcoin

• Women now represent 30% of crypto operations in Brazil, according to Receita Federal. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• A PT deputy introduced a bill to ban the use of crypto and Pix credit for betting houses. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Goiás began debating legislation to regulate the digital inheritance of crypto assets. 📰 Source: Livecoins

🌎 Regional / LatAm

• Tokenized stock trading in Latin America grew tenfold versus January, with Tesla, MicroStrategy and Nvidia the most traded tokenized equities in the first half of 2026, according to Bitget. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Pomelo expanded its global card product to more than 150 countries, with settlement available in dollars or stablecoins, letting companies issue Mastercard and Visa virtual cards without setting up local entities or licenses in each market. Rafael Goulart, head of Pomelo’s Brazil operation, said:

“We strongly believe that the main instrument for bringing stablecoins to merchants and into people’s and companies’ daily lives today is the card.” 📰 Source: Valor

🇦🇷 Argentina

• Argentina’s federal prosecutors completed evaluation of a bid to buy crypto-tracing software for forensic labs, worth roughly R$500,000, requested by its cybercrime and money-laundering units. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Argentina’s securities regulator authorized a new digital wallet from a local firm known for its crypto push. 📰 Source: Infobae

🇻🇪 Venezuela

• With banks open but the payment system effectively walled off, an informal crypto market is keeping commerce moving in Venezuela, according to CriptoNoticias. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

🇨🇱 Chile

• Chile revoked the registration of Plusspay, a crypto fintech authorities linked to the Tren de Aragua criminal group. 📰 Source: DiarioBitcoin

🇨🇴 Colombia

• Addi, a Colombian buy-now-pay-later fintech, raised an US$85 million Series D with BTG Pactual and Citius. 📰 Source: Startups.com.br

🇵🇪 Peru

• Bybit launched its Bybit Card in Peru, offering up to 120 USDT in rewards. 📰 Source: CriptoInforme

🇸🇻 El Salvador

• El Salvador now holds more than 7,700 bitcoin, worth roughly US$465 million. 📰 Source: Bitget

🇵🇾 Paraguay

• Crypto payments app Oobit launched in Guatemala and Paraguay. 📰 Source: Yahoo

⚡ Frontier Tech Rundown

🇧🇷 Brazil

• Ada Infrastructure broke ground on a R$2.7 billion (~US$500 million) data center in Franco da Rocha, in greater São Paulo. 📰 Source: Conexão Juquery

• Real estate startup QuintoAndar will invest R$2 billion (~US$370 million) over two years to make AI the backbone of its operations and is opening a new 7,000-square-meter headquarters in São Paulo’s Vila Leopoldina to house it. CEO Gabriel Braga said 80% of the company’s code is now written with AI assistance, and that AI tools have multiplied real estate agents’ transaction output tenfold. 📰 Source: Bloomberg Línea

• Jota, an AI-powered financial assistant for Brazilian microentrepreneurs and freelancers, raised a R$150 million (~US$30 million) Series A led by Haun Ventures, less than a year after a R$60 million seed round. 📰 Source: Bloomberg Línea

• Steven Carlini, Schneider Electric’‘’s senior director for data centers and AI, said Latin America’‘’s energy profile - nearly 70% of its electricity from renewables - gives the region a unique edge in attracting AI infrastructure investment, with Brazil, Chile and Mexico best positioned to capture it. 📰 Source: Bloomberg Línea

• Stenon, an agtech using AI-powered sensors for real-time soil analysis, raised a €18 million (~R$106 million) Series B led by Pymwymic to expand across South America, Central Asia and Europe. 📰 Source: Bloomberg Línea

🇲🇽 Mexico

• Brazil’s Odata lifted its Mexico data center investment to US$1.2 billion. 📰 Source: BNamericas

• Mexico’s state power utility CFE launched Oasis, its first green hydrogen generation project, aimed at shoring up energy security in Baja California Sur and reducing blackouts. 📰 Source: Expansión

• Mexico is drafting an artificial intelligence law, part of a broader regional scramble to set rules for the technology. 📰 Source: Red de Universidades Anáhuac

• Mexico broke into the global top 10 for AI patents. 📰 Source: ITSitio

🇦🇷 Argentina

• Genneia, Argentina’s largest renewable energy generator with over 1,580 MW of installed capacity across eight wind and six solar parks, filed an F-1 with the SEC in what could be the first Argentine IPO on Wall Street in more than seven years. 📰 Source: Infobae

🇨🇴 Colombia

• Colombia is accelerating AI adoption faster than several Latin American peers, according to Microsoft. 📰 Source: ENTER.CO

This edition will cover news from the region from June 15-27 as the last two weeks have been a bit crazy.

There’s been a TON of big news coming out of the Latam region over this period so I highly encourage you to read through to make sure you’re caught up on everything.

It was great seeing many of you in Mexico City at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference. I had a productive time there despite spraining my ankle really bad on Ben Reid’s Chapultepec Castle run 😒. We got a cool picture though!

This past week I was in Panama City where we teamed up with the Atlantic Council to produce USA House Panama at the Organization of American States’ General Assembly.

You may recall that I did our first USA House in Davos at World Economic Forum back in January, and now we’re trying to build this out as a “roadshow” activation across major multilateral events around the world.

I was in an ankle boot and crutches the whole time so not the smoothest experience but overall it was a big success!

I also reconnected with Benoni Belli, who now serves as Brazil’s Permanent Representative to the OAS. I had worked with him on some projects 10+ years back when we he was at the Brazil Embassy in Washington, DC

Top stories across both weeks:

• 🌎 The White House told Latin America to adopt US stablecoin rules, or cede ground to China

• 🇧🇷 Brazil’s Central Bank declared a core stablecoin funding mechanism illegal, making dollar-pegged stablecoins 2% more expensive overnight

• 🇧🇷 A separate Central Bank proposal would hold outbound crypto transfers of US$10,000+ for 24 hours before they can leave an exchange

• 🇧🇷 Brazil’s Congress will hold a hearing on how to classify stablecoins, with the Central Bank and the industry on opposite sides

• 🌎 Trace Finance raised US$32 million to push stablecoin payments deeper into Latin America

• 🇲🇽 Mexico billionaire Ricardo Salinas revealed 70% of his portfolio is in bitcoin and floated a 2030 presidential run

• 🌎 Binance named a new VP for Latin America as Guilherme Nazar steps back after four years building the regional operation

Thanks for reading and have a great week!

- AWS

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Bits and Borders Podcast

Two new episodes this week. The first is with Robson Silva, CTO and co-founder of Pods, recorded onsite at TokenNation in Sao Paulo. We talked about Pods journey building DeFi products before ultimately finding product market fit at a B2B2C business providing yield and DeFi infrastructure for neobanks and other

The second episode is with Caliza CEO Ezra Kebrab, whom I had the chance to catch up with in Mexico City at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference. We discussed how Caliza is helping companies move cross-border supplier and treasury payments, with most volume originating in Brazil and Mexico and flowing to China, Hong Kong, and the US.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

White House Crypto Envoy Tells Latin America to Adopt US Stablecoin Rules

Patrick Witt, the White House’s top official on digital assets, used the Stablecoin Conference 2026 in Mexico City to deliver a message that was less about payments than about geopolitics: Latin American countries should model their stablecoin rules on US legislation, and the alternative is ceding the region to Chinese influence.

He said:

“It is an important approach for this administration to ensure that our close neighbors, allies and partners are united with us, and that we are also repelling foreign influence from China.”

He described dollar-backed stablecoins as the payment infrastructure for a more economically integrated hemisphere, and held up the recently passed GENIUS Act alongside the pending CLARITY legislation as the template for the region to follow.

📰 Sources: CriptoNoticias | El Cronista

Brazil’s Central Bank Halts Crypto Fund FX Operations

Brazil’s Central Bank notified crypto companies, investment funds, and banks on June 23 to immediately suspend foreign exchange operations linked to the importing of virtual assets by investment funds.

The bank declared these operations illegal, summoning firms to formally communicate its view that FX transactions for the purpose of importing virtual assets are not permitted under current rules.

The impact on the stablecoin market was immediate. According to companies in the space, the notification made stablecoins up to 2% more expensive in Brazil, with knock-on effects threatening the liquidity of the entire crypto market.

The bank held a follow-up meeting with banks and exchanges on June 26, where it acknowledged the internal controls the market itself had developed but maintained the suspension in place.

What makes this messy is that the mechanism under scrutiny, importing virtual assets via FX operations, is exactly how a lot of stablecoin liquidity flows into the country. Calling it illegal without a clear replacement pathway leaves the market improvising.

📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | BlockNews | Exame

Brazil’s Central Bank Delays Stablecoin FX Reporting to November

Brazil’s Central Bank also pushed back the deadline for crypto exchanges and authorized FX institutions to begin submitting monthly reports on their virtual asset operations.

The reporting obligation, originally set to take effect with data due in early June, now starts on November 3, meaning firms will first report November’s operations in December.

The reporting requirement had been one of the points executives repeatedly flagged as among the most operationally complex to implement, and local exchanges had asked for more time to adapt their systems.

Industry associations welcomed the decision, framing the climbdown as a win achieved through dialogue with regulators.

Nicole Dyskant, CEO of RegDoor, told Valor the delay signals the regulator’s awareness of how difficult it is to meet simultaneous authorization, audit, and reporting obligations at once. She said:

“This coordination is important not only for companies but also for the regulator itself, which will tend to receive more consistent information at a moment of greater operational maturity in the market.”

📰 Sources: Livecoins | BlockNews | Portal do Bitcoin

Brazil’s Congress to Hold Hearing on Stablecoin Classification

Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies will hold a public hearing to discuss how stablecoins should be classified under the country’s crypto law, calling in both the Central Bank and the federal tax authority to testify.

The hearing was triggered by the Central Bank’s push to reclassify stablecoins as a separate category of asset, breaking from their current legal status as virtual assets.

The industry pushed back fast. ABCripto, a lobby group, delivered its own technical note to both the regulator and Congress, defending the position that stablecoins should continue to be treated as virtual assets, with prudential safeguards tailored to the sector rather than a reclassification that would pull them into a separate regime.

The concern is that reclassification would ripple into rules that only just took effect. Cesar Carvalho of ABToken told Valor that a change at this stage creates uncertainty for a framework still being absorbed by the market. He said:

“There are rules that were recently published and have just entered into force. So a change like this creates a certain concern.”

At the same time, Carvalho stressed that the industry supports the debate and wants it resolved quickly:

“The discussion is extremely necessary. But we should keep accelerating this process so that we have this framework in place as soon as possible.”

📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | Portal do Bitcoin | Livecoins | Valor

Brazil Proposes 24 Hour Hold on Crypto Exchange Withdrawals

Brazil’s Central Bank published a proposal that would require crypto exchanges to hold outbound transfers of US$10,000 or more for up to 24 hours before releasing the funds, whether the destination is a foreign exchange or a self-custody wallet.

The stated purpose is fraud prevention: the hold window gives exchanges time to run risk checks on large outbound flows before the transfer becomes irreversible.

The bank drew a careful line between a hold and a freeze. Its proposal reads:

“It is exclusively precautionary in nature and is intended for risk analysis of the respective operation, not implying definitive unavailability of assets.”

Exchanges can release funds early if their own risk policies support it.

The industry’s response was sharp. Regina Pedroso, president of ABToken, called the measure disproportionate and without precedent:

“The blanket freeze has no precedent, not even compared to Pix rules. We fear there is a disproportionality.”

The argument is pointed: if a Pix transfer of the same size clears in seconds, holding an equivalent crypto transfer for 24 hours requires more justification than the bank has offered so far.

📰 Sources: Valor | Cointelegraph Brasil | Portal do Bitcoin

Trace Finance Raises US$32 Million to Push Stablecoins in Latin America

Trace Finance, the Brazilian startup that connects stablecoin networks to local banking systems for cross-border payments, announced a US$32 million Series A funding round led by CoinFund, with Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, Jump Capital, and Chainlink Labs among the backers.

Trace builds tools for plugging stablecoins into local banking infrastructure for use by real businesses. It handles the compliance, foreign exchange, and local payment plumbing, including integration with Brazil’s Pix network, that enterprises need on top of the stablecoin layer.

The company has processed over US$10 billion in cross-border volume and says it is the main provider for four of Latin America’s leading global payment companies. Its valuation has grown roughly 10x since its 2022 seed round.

The individual investor list is worth noting. Ricardo Marino, vice chairman of Itaú Unibanco, Latin America’s largest bank, joined the round alongside Circle co-founder Sean Neville and Solana co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko.

CEO Bernardo Brites has been direct about the thesis: “Stablecoins plus regulated local bank infrastructure” is what actually solves cross-border payments.

Trace says it will use the capital to expand from its US-Brazil corridor into broader Latin America and Asia-Pacific.

📰 Sources: Decrypt | The Block | DiarioBitcoin

Mexico Billionaire Salinas Puts 70% of His Portfolio in Bitcoin

Ricardo Salinas, one of Mexico’s richest men, revealed that 70% of his portfolio is now held in bitcoin, and told CoinDesk he may run as a candidate in Mexico’s 2030 presidential election.

Salinas has been one of the country’s most vocal Bitcoin advocates since 2022, when he first argued the asset was a better inflation hedge than gold.

He returned to his familiar talking points, insisting there is nothing mysterious about money and pointing to historical examples, like cigarettes serving as currency, to make the case that value is a matter of social convention rather than state decree.

Separately, Salinas argued that Mexico’s core problem is what he called a virulent rejection of cryptocurrencies, positioning crypto skepticism as a drag on the country’s economic prospects.

📰 Sources: Livecoins | CriptoNoticias

Binance Promotes Daniel Acosta as New VP for Latam as Nazar Steps Back

Binance has named Daniel Acosta its new VP for Latin America, replacing Guilherme Nazar, who moves to a strategic advisor role after four years building the exchange’s regional presence from the ground up.

Acosta has run Binance’s Colombia and northern Latin America operations since 2022. Before joining Binance he spent a decade at Mastercard, where his final role was leading crypto and blockchain products for Latin America and the Caribbean.

Nazar joined when Binance had almost no formal footprint in the region and left with regulatory approvals secured in Argentina, Brazil, El Salvador, and Mexico.

📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | BlockNews | Livecoins

🗞 LatAm News Rundown

🇧🇷 Brazil

• Brazil’s Central Bank shut down Sefer Investimentos, a São Paulo securities distributor tied to the Banco Master case, taking the firm out of the market and opening the door to hold its controllers accountable. 📰 Source: BeInCrypto Brasil

• A Chamber of Deputies committee approved a bill that would officially designate Rolante, a city in Rio Grande do Sul, as Brazil’s National Capital of Bitcoin. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Oobit, a Tether-backed crypto payments app, integrated USDT with Brazil’s Pix payment network, giving access to nearly 170 million users. 📰 Source: The Block

• Mercado Bitcoin launched an RWA token for an undefeated Brazilian UFC champion, extending its athlete tokenization push. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• The Central Bank will officially launch its electronic duplicata ecosystem on June 30, a digital version of trade receivables that can serve as backing for real-world asset tokens. 📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | BlockNews

• Money laundering tied to drug trafficking, with the PCC, Comando Vermelho, and cartels named, leads crypto-related crime in Brazil, according to Valor Investe. 📰 Source: Valor Investe

• Brazil is a hotbed for criminal usage of cryptocurrencies by criminal networks, according to a report by Chainalysis. More than half of the illicit flows tracked into Brazilian exchanges now come from just three sources: Chinese-language money laundering operations, Russian sanctioned entities, and Brazilian organized crime groups including the PCC and Comando Vermelho. By early 2026, 80% of that dirty money was flowing through just five wallet addresses. 📰 Sources: Chainalysis | Livecoins

• ABCripto and Chainalysis signed a partnership to train regulators and companies on crypto compliance and market development in Brazil. 📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | Portal do Bitcoin

• The Juntos por Cripto movement, born in the US in 2023 and backed by Coinbase, Kraken, Paradigm, and Anchorage, officially launched in Brazil to mobilize the country’s estimated 20 million crypto users to pressure Congress. 📰 Source: BlockNews

• Blockchain.com announced its expansion into Brazil. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Mercado Bitcoin has originated R$47 million (~US$8.7 million) in crypto-collateralized loans since opening to its full client base in March and is targeting R$100 million for the year. 📰 Sources: Valor | Portal do Bitcoin

• Mercado Bitcoin launched a Super Cashback product paying out in Bitcoin tied to the performance of Brazil’s national football team during the World Cup. 📰 Source: Portal do Bitcoin

• OranjeBTC bought 18 BTC and pledged to buy one more for every goal Brazil scores at the World Cup as part of its accumulation strategy. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Weekly RWA issuance in Brazil came in at R$24.74 million, down 13%, even as the total market climbed to R$8.97 billion (~US$1.65 billion), with receivables sustaining most of the new issuance. 📰 Source: Cointelegraph Brasil

• Five industry groups including ABCripto and ABFintechs pushed back on a proposed securities regulator rule change they say would effectively kill Brazil's tokenized debt market, which has grown from R$7 million in 2022 to R$4.9 billion by 2025. 📰 Source: Exame

• Federal District police dismantled a fraud ring that ran 425 fake Pix transactions through a national credit cooperative, causing R$5.5 million in losses and using crypto wallets to hide the proceeds. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Rio de Janeiro’s police created a dedicated unit, NuCripto, to trace cryptocurrencies in investigations. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Santa Catarina police seized roughly R$368,000 in self-custody crypto from a couple accused of diverting R$9 million from a local company, in what authorities called the state's largest ever self-custody crypto seizure. Chainalysis tools were used to track the wallets. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Civil police in Rio Grande do Sul arrested a suspect accused of extorting business owners and demanding payment in Bitcoin. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• Police in Florianópolis captured a fugitive wanted for the kidnapping of a Bitcoin investor from Rondônia seven years ago. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• A crypto influencer was kidnapped in Espírito Santo but managed to escape. 📰 Source: Livecoins

• The Faraó dos Bitcoins was denied a pardon by the STJ, which ruled that only the President of the Republic can grant such a request. 📰 Source: Livecoins

🇻🇪 Venezuela

• Binance Charity will donate US$3 million in 20 USDT token vouchers and waive P2P and Binance Pay fees for seven days to help users in the areas hardest hit by recent earthquakes, including La Guaira, the Capital District, and Miranda, with eligibility based on proof of address completed before June 26. 📰 Sources: Livecoins | CriptoNoticias

• A Bitcoin emergency fund was opened to support victims of the Venezuela earthquakes, with Bitcoin, Ethereum, and USDT featuring at the center of humanitarian donation drives. 📰 Sources: CriptoNoticias | Cripto247

• CriptoNoticias examined what would happen to USDT in Venezuela if the economy were formally dollarized, given how deeply the stablecoin is embedded in everyday commerce. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• Bitchat, a Bluetooth-based messaging app, is being promoted as an alternative for communicating during internet outages in Venezuela. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

🇦🇷 Argentina

• Argentina's government eliminated the check tax on crypto operations for registered companies, removing a levy that had applied to crypto transactions alongside traditional banking flows. 📰 Sources: Infobae | roadshow.com.ar

• Bitget and Ondo Finance partnered to let Argentines buy tokenized shares of Apple, Google, and Tesla using crypto. 📰 Source: iProfesional

• The CNV, Argentina’s securities regulator, is accelerating asset tokenization in Argentina, targeting a market it pegs at US$16 trillion. 📰 Sources: iProUP | Panorama Directo

• Stablecoins are putting Argentine banks on the back foot and pointing to a sharp drop in their profits, according to iProUP. 📰 Source: iProUP

• A prosecutor requested the crypto operation history in Argentina dating back to 2012 to investigate the alibi of presidential spokesman Manuel Adorni. 📰 Source: Clarín

• Milei’s cabinet chief Guillermo Francos claimed to be the crypto investor nobody expected, in an interview with Bloomberg Línea. 📰 Source: Bloomberg Línea

• A possible hack at BBVA Argentina is being cited as a fresh warning about the risks of centralized custodians of personal data. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

🇲🇽 Mexico

• Stablecoins now account for 40% of all purchases on Bitso, the exchange disclosed. 📰 Source: Mobile Time

• Bitso laid out what it calls a “Hybrid Finance” era as stablecoins reshape global payments. 📰 Source: CoinDesk

• LBank is betting on Mexico after identifying it as having the largest crypto activity in Latin America. 📰 Source: NotiPress

• CriptoNoticias took stock of where the stablecoin market stands in Mexico amid the regulatory uncertainty. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

🌎 Regional

• Stablecoins overtook Bitcoin to become the most-purchased crypto asset in Latin America. 📰 Source: Estadão

• Stablecoin usage has reached 71% of institutions in Latin America, according to grafa.com. 📰 Source: grafa.com

• Daniel Acosta is Binance’s new Regional VP for Latin America, taking over from Guilherme Nazar, who moves to a strategic consultant role. Acosta had served as Binance’s general manager for Colombia and northern Latin America since 2022. 📰 Sources: Cointelegraph Brasil | BlockNews | Livecoins

• Lumx, the BTG Pactual-backed stablecoin payments infrastructure firm, launched a collaborative Stable Operator Map with 150 operators across eight countries and 14 categories. 📰 Sources: BlockNews | Livecoins

• Borderless.xyz added alfred to its stablecoin network, extending coverage across 11 Latin American countries. 📰 Source: TradingView

• OKX launched the OKX Card in Latin America for crypto payments. 📰 Source: TyN Magazine

• iProUP examined how the EU-Mercosur pact could affect stablecoins, tokenization, and regional trade. 📰 Source: iProUP

• El Cronista detailed the US plan to dollarize remittances across Latin America using stablecoins.

• Patrick Witt, Executive Director of the White House President’s Council on Digital Assets, called on Latin American countries to adopt the GENIUS Act stablecoin framework at the Stablecoin Conference 2026 in Mexico City, framing the push in explicit geopolitical terms: “It is an important approach for this administration to ensure that our close neighbors, allies and partners are united with us, and that we are also repelling foreign influence from China.” Witt described dollar-backed stablecoins as payment rails for hemispheric economic integration and cited both the GENIUS Act and the pending CLARITY legislation as the regional template. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias 📰 Source: El Cronista

🇨🇴 Colombia

• Rain exchange’s “State of Stablecoins in Latin America” report found that 99% of Colombian pesos entering centralized exchanges immediately convert to stablecoins, primarily USDT and USDC. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• CriptoNoticias argued that Abelardo de la Espriella’s runoff win could reshape bitcoin policy across Latin America if he reaches the presidency, given his pro-market posture. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

• Money Expo Colombia 2026 closed in Bogotá with more than 4,500 attendees and participation from twenty countries. 📰 Source: CriptoTendencia

🇨🇱 Chile

• Pomelo expanded its footprint in Chile, launching a loyalty product and deepening its stablecoin push across Latin America. 📰 Source: TipRanks

• The Digital Assets Hub convened financial leaders from across Latin America in Santiago. 📰 Source: DiarioBitcoin

🇵🇪 Peru

• Peru moved quickly to regulate AI but has frozen its Bitcoin legislation, according to CriptoNoticias. 📰 Source: CriptoNoticias

🇵🇾 Paraguay

• Paraguay convicted two people involved in stealing electricity to power a crypto mining operation. 📰 Source: Livecoins

🇸🇻 El Salvador

• El Salvador continued its daily Bitcoin purchases amid growing institutional interest, per Cointelegraph’s running tracker. 📰 Source: Coinfomania

I caught up with Caliza CEO Ezra Kebrab at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City earlier this month.

We sat down to discuss how Caliza is helping companies move cross-border supplier and treasury payments, with most volume originating in Brazil and Mexico and flowing to China, Hong Kong, and the US.

Kebrab’s path ran through a peer-to-peer wallet startup sold to Square in 2013, then Visa, where he watched Pix and real-time payments take off in Brazil.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversation

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That experience exposed a gap: domestic rails kept improving while cross-border payments stayed stuck, which became the founding insight behind Caliza five years ago.

• Caliza started as a traditional payments company, and the model has always been to marry stablecoin rails with traditional banking infrastructure rather than replace it.

• After the 2023 banking crisis, Caliza decided to build its own licenses and banking partnerships rather than rely on intermediaries.

• The company has grown consistently above 40% month over month, with 60% growth last month.

• Customers range from customs and FX brokers without engineering teams to global API clients like Flutterwave, Skydo, and LianLian.

• Kebrab pushes back on framing stablecoin players as “the Swift killer.” Swift has built strong standardization for supplier payments, and the real differentiation in cross-border isn’t the rail, it’s the workflow: tax codes, payment messaging, and local compliance criteria that determine whether goods clear customs.

• On agentic commerce, Kebrab sees the near-term opportunity in back-office reconciliation, not consumer payments, helping treasury teams abstract away the work of tracking cash across a dozen markets and currencies. He argues

“If you do not have any form of agentic commerce in how you think about building your company, you’re becoming a relic very fast.”

Caliza is expanding further into Africa and building out collections to Asia in the coming months.

I really enjoyed this conversation with Ezra and I hope you do as well. You can connect with him on Linkedin

Have a great weekend everyone,

-AWS

Recent Episodes

Robson Silva is Co-Founder of Pods.

He joins the show to discuss how DeFi’s lack of traction with retail pushed Pods toward building modular yield infrastructure for Latin America’s neobanks.

The conversation was recorded live at the TokenNation event in São Paulo.

It lands at a moment when neobanks and traditional banks alike are racing to bolt yield products onto their stacks without retrofitting their core infrastructure.

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Silva trained as a naval engineer before finding crypto in 2017, then spent a year in Singapore working on early AMM research during the ICO era.

He returned to Brazil and co-founded Pods as a DeFi options protocol, building toward almost $10 million in TVL without ever launching a token.

Along the way, Pods also ran a zero-knowledge privacy pilot for Brazil’s CBDC, tokenized construction debt with the registry notary Núclea, and tokenized Brazilian government bonds with Mercado Bitcoin.

🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts

🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversation

Key takeways from the conversation:

• Pods spent two and a half years building a DeFi options protocol before realizing retail flows weren’t coming through MetaMask.

• The team built a zero-knowledge privacy pilot for Brazil’s central bank digital currency project, working alongside competing approaches from Microsoft and EY.

• Programmable privacy for composable DeFi remains unsolved. Silva argues AMMs may need to be rebuilt from scratch rather than patched with a privacy layer on top.

• Pods pivoted to B2B, letting neobanks plug into insured, cross-chain yield vaults through an API instead of building that infrastructure themselves.

• Crypto wallet Picnic moved more than 10% of its idle-asset user base into a Pods-powered savings account within 10 days of launch.

• Pods’ cross-chain USDC-to-BRLA product is now running close to $2 million in monthly volume in Brazil.

I enjoyed this wide-ranging conversation with Rob and I hope you do as well.

You can connect with him on Linkedin

Have a great weekend, everyone

-AWS

Recent Episodes