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Olá pessoal!
For today’s podcast episode I’m joined by Parfin CEO Marcos Viriato. Marcos is a Brazil financial industry veteran - he was previously a partner at BTG Pactual before becoming an angel investor and ultimately CEO of Parfin, a leading Web3 and blockchain infrastructure provider in Brazil and Latin America.
Marcos and his team have held to the thesis that institutional adoption of crypto and blockchain will ultimately happen via permissioned networks and solutions.
The Parfin team has also been heavily involved in the Drex (formerly Digital Real) ecosystem, which has been facilitated by the Brazil Central Bank. Parfin and Santander Brasil developed a delivery-versus-payment solution for tokenizing and transferring car titles in last year’s LIFT Challenge (essentially a sandbox for CBDC applications).
The company is also a participant in one of the 16 Drex pilot consortia currently underway and is supporting several others with technology solutions.
In this episode we discuss:
How Marcos discovered the Satoshi white paper as a partner at BTG Pactual and bought his first bitcoin for $600
The technological potential he saw during the 2017 ICO boom. While most of tokens issued were junk with nothing backing them, the underlying tech allowed for a global distribution of decentralized assets
Parfin’s original 2019 vision of issuing a regulated stablecoin in the UK, followed by a pivot to institutional infrastructure
Parfin’s current product suite - including Parfin Terminal, MPC custody, crypto-as-a-service for Tradfi banks and brokerages, tokenization services and ParChain
How Parfin has sought to bring crypto-native concepts like decentralized finance, liquidity pools and automated makers to regulated TradFi environments like the CVM’s (Brazilian SEC) regulatory sandbox, and the LIFT Challenge and Drex pilot being run by the Brazil Central Bank
Why Framework Ventures, an American blue chip crypto VC, decided to lead Parfin’s US$15 million seed round
Why the timing of a technology product launch is just as an important of a factor in a product’s success as the actual technology itself
I really enjoyed this conversation with Marcos and I hope you do as well. You can learn more about Parfin at https://parfin.io/en/ and you can connect with Marcos on Linkedin
Have a great week everyone!
-AWS
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Episode #62: Building Institutional Rails with Parfin CEO Marcos Viriato