Stablecoins are reshaping how money moves across borders — faster, cheaper, and more seamless. Joining us to discuss this and more is Bernardo Brites, co-founder and CEO of Trace Finance, a stablecoin company that has processed more than $10 billion, connecting Brazil, Latin America, and now eyeing the UAE. He's going to talk to us about his Series A raise and how the UAE stacks up against other markets across the globe. Bernardo, thanks for joining us today. How are you?
Amazing. Pleasure to be here today.
Let's talk a little bit more about this Series A fundraise. Tell us about the business and what this funding means for the next growth phase specifically.
Definitely. So we raised $32 million with amazing investors such as CoinFund, Coinbase Ventures, Paxos, and a lot of different stablecoin issuers — we also have Circle Ventures on the cap table. We are really aiming for global expansion now. We're already very strong in the US, Brazil, and Latin America, and we're already running operations in Europe and now APAC as well. Later last year we came into Abu Dhabi and Dubai to scope out the local markets, spoke a lot with branches of companies in the UAE, and we think it's a really interesting market for us.
Let's talk about the UAE market specifically. Why is it such an attractive market and what opportunities does the company see there?
I think the UAE is definitely a gateway into MENA in general. For Africa payments, we see a lot of companies holding bank accounts in the UAE — we see the same effect in Asia, where several companies hold bank accounts for cross-border payments in Singapore. So we really see the UAE not only as a hub for companies to move money in and out of the Africa and Middle East region, but we also see that increasing with stablecoins. We think the dominance of local currencies will become higher and higher over time. And although 99% of stablecoin volume is currently in US dollars, we think more and more local hubs will emerge — like Brazil, UAE, and Singapore — where we'll actually see adoption of local stablecoins to facilitate cross-border trade.
You've been eyeing the UAE, but you're also all over Latin America and the US. Comparing those markets — what's the biggest difference in terms of regulation, adoption, and opportunity? And how does Latin America compare to the UAE?
I would say ADGM and VARA have been very friendly towards crypto companies, enabling exchanges to operate in the market as well. We're seeing a lot of opportunity there, mainly because we now see huge export and import flows moving through that specific corridor. What we've seen in Latin America is that it's very fragmented — and you have the same dynamic happening in the UAE, the Middle East, and Africa. You have so many different currencies, and you need to concentrate them into one, which is why USD is so strong in those markets. But if AED were to become the currency that other countries gravitate toward for international commerce, we think that would unlock a lot of dynamics. We see the Brazilian real as the most important economy and payments hub in Latin America, and we see the UAE playing the same role for the Middle East and broader African region — where a lot of payment flows could happen through an AED stablecoin, even for trades outside the UAE itself, because it's a global leader in that region.
Beyond the US and the UAE, where are you seeing the strongest momentum in stablecoin adoption? Are you seeing anything in Asia-Pacific, or is growth still primarily in Latin America?
We're actually seeing a huge APAC push now. In Hong Kong, with the new regulations, only a small number of players have been approved so far, but we see Hong Kong as the gateway into China — and it's really interesting to see this sandbox approach to stablecoins there. We're also seeing Japan and South Korea with more and more bank consortiums being built, looking at a JPY stablecoin and a Korean won stablecoin gaining traction. A lot of them are still in the early stages of development, but we'll really start to see real adoption when some of those banks adopt it by default. Imagine one of the Japanese banks saying all of their cross-border trades will flow through the JPY stablecoin — that would enable billions, if not trillions of dollars flowing into that stablecoin volume. And we now have the infrastructure to support it. A few years ago, you only had Ethereum and a few other networks that could handle this type of volume, and it wouldn't have been ideal — when you're talking about moving trillions of dollars in billions of transactions per day, you need truly efficient infrastructure. Now with Solana, Canton, and several other networks, I think we're really able to support a lot of the global flows on-chain.
As we wrap up — the UAE is obviously a growing market. With Trace Finance stepping in, what's your vision for the next 5 to 10 years?
We really believe that for cross-border payments to reach their best version, you need to build a model like Wise, but on steroids. Essentially, you need local liquidity pools — being locally regulated — and if you have infrastructure on both ends of the transaction, you can enable cross-border flows to really thrive. If we're regulated as a bank in Brazil and we also have an ADGM regulation in the UAE, we can facilitate things that other players wouldn't be able to process. A lot of players are trying to dominate specific cross-border corridors, but to do that well, you really need both ends of the rail built out. We think we're going to see more local hubs for each region becoming increasingly important — the UAE, Singapore, Brazil, the US, and a couple of others — each becoming the hub for their region, with a local stablecoin becoming the source of liquidity to move money in and out. We're very excited about the next 5 to 10 years. I think adoption will grow into the trillions.
Awesome, Bernardo. Thank you so much for joining us today. It's exciting to see the growth of the company and the impact it's going to make in the UAE. Thank you so much for joining us.
