Inside MERGE São Paulo: On-the-Ground Coverage from BeInCrypto

São Paulo delivered the conversations. The metropolis itself, much less so.

As an official media associate, BeInCrypto was on the bottom for all of it. Our LATAM Team Lead, Luis Magalhães, led our presence on the occasion, conducting unique interviews, becoming a member of panel discussions, and making certain our viewers throughout Portuguese, Spanish, and international platforms had full entry to the conversations shaping the area’s crypto panorama.

Here is what the week seemed like from the place we had been standing.

What Stood Out on the Floor

MERGE São Paulo drew a crowd that’s genuinely onerous to search out at most conferences on this area. The folks within the room had been builders, operators, and capital allocators who had accomplished the studying and put within the hours. No wristband queue stretching across the block. No shouting over a DJ at 2 p.m. simply to trade a enterprise card.

What gave the occasion its edge on a packed convention calendar was the corporate combine. Regulated establishments, self-custody infrastructure firms, and fintechs processing actual fee quantity, all in the identical room, conversing and bouncing off of concepts. Which makes the crossover much more uncommon, and Brazil wants extra of it.

The occasion was additionally the correct measurement. Big sufficient to really feel vital and sufficiently small to run into the identical attention-grabbing individual 3 times in a day.

On-Ground Leadership and Exclusive Interviews

BeInCrypto carried out unique interviews with key figures throughout conventional finance, decentralized infrastructure, and fintech, together with:

• Stijn Vander Straeten, CEO at Crypto Finance. Check out the unique interview here.
• André Portilho, Head of Digital Assets at BTG Pactual. Check out the unique interview here.

On the Panel Stage

Beyond the interviews, Luis additionally took the stage as a moderator on the occasion’s invitation-only Institutional Summit. There, he led the panel ‘Stablecoins in Practice: Real-World Use Cases Across Brazil’s Fintech Ecosystem’, bringing collectively Carlos Jiménez, BD and Partnerships Manager at Rain; Pedro Barreiro, Director of Banking at Nomad; and Marcos Nunes, CEO at Tangem Pay. 

The high-level dialog mentioned how stablecoins are reshaping monetary infrastructure throughout the area, ache factors and alternatives each for conventional finance establishments and DeFi firms.

During the second day of occasion, the chief was within the panel on ‘Tokenized Money: CBDCs, Tokenized Deposits and the Future of Digital Liquidity’, with Jaime Pradenas Baeza, Head of Financial Technology Hub at Banco Central de Chile; Bruno Grossi, Head of Digital Assets at Inter; and Nayam Hanashiro, Head Strategic Projects and Digital Public Goods at LNET. 

The conversations touched upon a number of use circumstances of tokenized cash within the area and the way large regulators and neobanks are reshaping the whole industry. 

São Paulo Is a Hard City

No occasion recap from MERGE São Paulo can be full with out addressing the elephant within the room, which isn’t the convention itself however the metropolis internet hosting it.

São Paulo is a megalopolis, and it strikes like one. Navigating between the principle venue and facet occasions throughout completely different neighborhoods just isn’t a brief experience. It is site visitors, distance, and the actual exhaustion of a metropolis that was not constructed for pedestrian spontaneity. For a convention the place a good portion of the actual deal-making occurs at satellite tv for pc occasions, that friction issues.

Side occasions noticed thinner attendance than they deserved. Scheduling collisions had been tougher to handle. The casual power that makes facet occasions price attending, the unintentional run-ins, the dinners that stretch previous midnight, the dialog that begins between venues and ends in a partnership, all of it was a little bit dearer in effort and time than it wanted to be.

This just isn’t a criticism of the MERGE staff. The curation, the programming, and the neighborhood they’re constructing round TradFi-DeFi convergence in Brazil are all genuinely price your time. But one of the best moments at conferences like this occur within the margins, and São Paulo has a approach of creating these margins pricey. 

The occasion deserves a metropolis that will get out of its approach. Rio de Janeiro, with its extra compressed geography and simpler motion between neighbourhoods, involves thoughts. So does a smaller metropolis totally.

Worth Attending. Just Come Prepared.

MERGE São Paulo is an efficient occasion. That is the trustworthy, easy verdict. The conversations are actual, the viewers is critical, and the TradFi-DeFi crossover it’s facilitating within the Brazilian market is among the extra compelling tales in regional crypto proper now.

If you might be planning to attend future editions, do your self a favour: map your facet occasions upfront, construct in additional journey time, and settle for that town will value you not less than one dialog you had been hoping to have. Go for the correct causes, and MERGE will ship.

For continued protection of Brazil’s evolving crypto and fintech panorama, observe us at beincrypto.com/pt-br and throughout our Spanish-language platforms.

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