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Bits and Borders

Bits and Borders

Hosted by Aaron Stanley

BusinessNewsInterviews guests
WebsiteRSS feedLinkedInYouTube

Episodes

200

Latest episode

Aug 2026

Language

EN

About the show

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

Listen to episodes

60 recent
August 14, 202635 min

#193: Live from Ai4: AI as Predictive Intelligence with Knowidea

Yatharth Sejpal and Brian Li are co-founder/CEO and co-founder/CTO of Knowidea. They join host Aaron Stanley at the Ai4 Conference in Las Vegas to discuss why they're betting on formally verified, deterministic AI instead of the 95 percent confidence models most companies accept. The two explain their neurosymbolic architecture, which forces AI agents to produce a mathematical proof for every output, and why that distinction matters for agentic payments and fraud prevention. They also share use cases spanning oil and gas, wealth management, and M&A.You can connect with Yatharth Sejpal and Brian Li on LinkedInhttps://www.linkedin.com/in/yatharth-sejpal/https://www.linkedin.com/in/zhengyu-brian-li/Subscribe to Bits and Borders on Substack

August 14, 202644 min

#192: The Modular Stablecoin Revolution with M0's Luca Prosperi

Luca Prosperi is CEO and co-founder of M0. He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss the state of stablecoin infrastructure in 2026, two years after his first appearance on the show. They cover the wallet-centric shift in finance, the fight over stablecoin yield, and why Prosperi thinks local-currency stablecoins, not on-chain FX, will be the next big trend. Prosperi also breaks down what M0's partnerships with PayPal, MoneyGram, and MetaMask reveal about where stablecoin infrastructure is headed.You can connect with Luca on LinkedIn Subscribe to Bits and Borders on Substack----------------------------------------------------------------Bits and Borders is presented by SumsubSumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base.Read the full report here:

August 1, 202632 min

#191: Crossing the Stablecoin Adoption Chasm - Live from Bitso Stablecoin Conference

Joao Reginatto of M0, Monica Ramirez of Anchorage Digital, Olivia Vande Woude of Ava Labs, and Sheraz Shere of Solana Foundation join host Aaron Stanley at the Bitso Business Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss stablecoin readiness and the gap between corporate intent and implementation. The tech and the regulatory picture have mostly caught up, but companies are still stuck on accounting treatment, internal buy-in, and a shortage of talent that understands both crypto and traditional finance. The panel covers real examples like MoneyGram's board approval process and OpenTrade's work winning over CFOs, then closes with a lightning round of bold predictions on where stablecoins go next.You can connect with Joao Reginatto, Monica Ramirez, Olivia Vande Woude, and Sheraz Shere on LinkedIn Subscribe to Bits and Borders on ⁠Substack⁠-------------------------------------------------Bits and Borders is presented by SumsubSumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base.Read the full report ⁠here⁠:

July 28, 202628 min

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

Olivia Vande Woude is Tokenization Lead at Ava Labs. She joins host Aaron Stanley at Bitso's Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss why distribution, not issuance, is the hardest problem left to solve in tokenized real world assets. We talk through Open Trade's B2B2C stablecoin yield model gaining traction across LATAM and APAC, a coming wave of consolidation among crypto neobanks and card issuers, and why real utility metrics matter more than vanity numbersYou can connect with Olivia on LinkedinSubscribe to Bits and Borders on Substack-------------------------------------------------Bits and Borders is presented by SumsubSumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base.Read the full report here: ⁠

July 17, 202624 min

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

Guillermo Goncalvez is CEO of El Dorado. He joins host Aaron Stanley at Bitso's Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss El Dorado's new $9 million Series A round, led by Paradigm with Coinbase Ventures participating.Goncalvez explains how El Dorado is taking the liquidity network it built serving over a million consumers across Latin America and redeploying it for a new B2B product aimed at import and export businesses. They also talk about the wave of foreign investor interest opening up in Venezuela.You can connect with Guillermo Goncalvez on LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/guillermogoncalvez/Bits and Borders is presented by SumsubSumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub's internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub's customer base.Read the full report here: https://sumsub.com/crypto-industry-report-2026/?utm_source=promenade&utm_medium=media&utm_campaign=crypto-report_report_2026

July 12, 202630 min

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

Rafael Luz and Bernardo Brites are co-founders of Trace Finance, a Brazilian cross-border payments infrastructure company. They join host Aaron Stanley at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City to discuss the company's $32 million Series A and the launch of a BRL-backed stablecoin.The company recently raised a $32 million round led by CoinFund, with Coinbase Ventures, Jump, Paxos, and others.Trace is launching what it expects to be the largest BRL-backed stablecoin, aimed at giving global companies access to Brazilian real for the first time without running into Brazil's capital controls.You can connect with Bernardo and Rafael on Linkedin-------------------------------------------------------Bits and Borders is presented by SumsubSumsub recently released its fourth annual State of the Crypto Industry report. The new research reveals how digital asset companies are balancing fraud prevention, regulatory pressure, and user experience as they scale in 2026. This report draws on Sumsub’s internal data from 2024–2025 and insights from 300 crypto companies surveyed outside Sumsub’s customer base.Read the full report here:

June 26, 202615 min

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

Ezra Kebrab is co-founder of Caliza.He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss cross-border stablecoin payments in Latin America.Recorded live at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City.Caliza handles cross-border supplier and treasury payments, with most volume flowing between Brazil, Mexico, China, Hong Kong, and the US.Kebrab traces his path from Visa, where he watched Pix transform real-time payments in Brazil, to founding Caliza five years ago on a stablecoin-first model built on top of traditional banking infrastructure.He explains why Caliza has grown 40-60% month over month, why he doesn't view stablecoin rails as a replacement for Swift, and why workflow and local compliance knowledge are what actually win customer trust.He also shares his read on agentic commerce, where he sees the near-term opportunity in back-office reconciliation rather than consumer payments.Caliza is expanding into Africa and Asia in the coming months.You can connect with Ezra on Linkedin

June 19, 202634 min

#186: Unbundling the SuperApp with Robson Silva of Pods

Robson Silva Junior is Co-Founder of Pods.He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss how DeFi's mixed retail adoption led Pods to build modular yield infrastructure for Latin America's neobanks.Recorded live at the Token Nation event in São Paulo, the conversation traces Silva's path from naval engineering to early AMM research during Singapore's ICO era.Silva explains why Pods abandoned its B2C options protocol once it became clear retail users weren't going to interact with MetaMask directly.He also discusses Pods' work building a zero-knowledge privacy pilot for Brazil's central bank digital currency, and why programmable privacy for composable DeFi remains unsolved.The episode closes on how neobanks now use Pods' API to offer insured, cross-chain yield without building that infrastructure in-house.You can connect with Rob on Linkedin

June 10, 202635 min

#185: Unlocking Stablecoin Liquidity with Checker CEO Jack Chong

Jack Chong is co-founder and CEO of Checker, a stablecoin liquidity network connecting FX banks, payments companies, and neobanks across emerging markets.He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss why cross-border stablecoin payments are still broken, and how Checker is building the infrastructure layer to fix it.Chong's path from Hong Kong to Oxford to a language school in Jordan to building stablecoin rails in New York and Latin America is not a straight line, but it explains exactly why Checker is built the way it is: global product, local execution, regional investors with boots on the ground.In its first 12 months, the network processed over $3 billion in payment volume.Chong breaks down the Brazil-China corridor, where most cross-border business payments still run through informal brokers, and makes the case for why Brazil's VASP regulation arriving in Q4 is a pivotal moment for any institution that wants to offer stablecoin products.He also floats an intriguing idea: stablecoins as the conduit that opens the BRL carry trade, long a Wall Street macro favorite, to crypto natives and retail investors.

June 5, 20261 hr 6 min

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

David Z. Morris is a financial journalist and author of Stealing the Future, a post-trial account of the FTX collapse and the effective altruism ideology behind it.He joins host Aaron Stanley to discuss what the criminal trial revealed that earlier books missed, why Michael Lewis's account functionally serves as a defense of the fraud, and how the ideology that shaped Sam Bankman-Fried continues to circulate under new names.Morris was part of the CoinDesk team that broke the story and later covered the trial for Protos.Topics include the SBF truther movement, speculative but documented questions about Sullivan & Cromwell's intelligence connections, Caroline Ellison's story, stimulant culture at FTX, and how effective altruism has rebranded as "abundance" and "effective accelerationism."Morris argues that EA gave SPF an ethical framework that explicitly justified stealing customer funds - and that the same logic is still being sold to engineers in Silicon Valley today.

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