Trace Finance

Trace Finance is a regulated financial infrastructure company that combines local banking rails, stablecoin settlement, and foreign exchange operations to enable cross-border payments between Latin America, the United States, and emerging markets worldwide. Founded in 2021 by Brazilians Bernardo Brites, Rafael Luz, and Leone Parise, the company is headquartered in the United States and holds operating licenses in both the U.S. and Brazil.

The Problem

Cross-border payments into and out of Latin America have historically been slow, expensive, and compliance-intensive. Brazilian regulations reclassified cross-border digital asset transfers as foreign-exchange operations, raising the bar for institutional participants. Local payment rails like PIX operate on schedules and in formats that global payment infrastructure was not built to accommodate, while traditional correspondent banking adds days of latency and significant markup. Pure-crypto approaches lack the regulatory standing that enterprise clients require.

Trace Finance positions itself at the intersection of these systems: holding the necessary licenses, maintaining banking partnerships, and using stablecoins as the settlement layer connecting local fiat rails with global payment flows.

How It Works

The platform is delivered as a single API that enterprise clients, fintechs, exchanges, and global payment processors integrate once to access Trace's full stack.

BRL enters the system via PIX, Brazil's instant payment network. BRL-to-stablecoin conversions settle in under 60 seconds, 24 hours a day including weekends and holidays, outside the cutoff windows that constrain traditional bank wires.

Once funds are on-chain, Trace routes them through stablecoin rails — primarily USDC and USDT — across multiple blockchain networks. The company is a member of Circle's Alliance ecosystem and integrates USDC alongside Circle Mint, Wallets, and smart contract tooling. Supported networks span Arbitrum, Avalanche, Base, Aptos, and Algorand, among others. Multi-source liquidity routing optimizes execution across transaction sizes.

Settlement back to fiat occurs via local banking rails in destination markets. Real-time FX rate locking is available at transaction initiation, and clients can hold multi-currency balances in BRL, USD, and EUR simultaneously without establishing a local Brazilian entity.

Additional API primitives include TED bank transfers, Boleto bill payments, beneficiary registration, webhook notifications with signature verification, idempotency controls, and full AML/CFT audit trails. The platform targets 99.9% uptime.

Compliance Architecture

Compliance is a stated competitive differentiator rather than an afterthought. Every operation runs through automated KYC and AML/CFT transaction monitoring with full audit trails. Trace operates as a licensed intermediary — not a shadow wallet — which positions it to serve institutional clients including major global payment networks that require regulatory-grade counterparties for Brazil exposure. Banking infrastructure is provided in partnership with Cross River Bank.

Traction and Customers

Trace Finance has processed over 10 billion dollars in institutional cross-border volume and is the primary infrastructure provider for the four largest global payment companies operating in Latin America, including dLocal. Other known partners include MoonPay, Bitso, and OKX. The company operates active payment corridors in Brazil, the United States, Mexico, Colombia, and Argentina, with regulated presence expanding into Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Southeast Asia.

Team and Funding History

CEO Bernardo Brites has articulated the company's core thesis as: stablecoins plus regulated local bank infrastructure — not stablecoins alone — constitute the actual structural work required to make cross-border payments function at institutional scale. The company grew from approximately 25 employees at the start of 2026 to 48 by mid-year.

Trace raised a $4.3 million seed round in 2022 led by HOF Capital. It then closed a $32 million Series A in December 2025, publicly announced in June 2026. The lead investor was CoinFund, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Haun Ventures, Jump Crypto, Valor Capital, Paxos, HOF Capital, Chainlink Labs, and SNZ Capital. The round represented approximately a 10x increase in valuation from the seed stage. CoinFund Partner Einar Braathen joined the company's board.

Strategic angels backing the Series A include Anatoly Yakovenko (co-founder of Solana Labs), Sean Neville (co-founder of Circle), Bam Azizi (CEO of Mesh), and Ricardo Villela Marino (Partner and Vice Chairman at Itaú Unibanco, Latin America's largest bank by assets).

Solana Ecosystem Fit

Trace Finance is not a native Solana application — it operates across multiple blockchain networks with a focus on regulated fiat connectivity rather than DeFi protocols. Its relevance to the Solana ecosystem is primarily strategic and infrastructural.

Anatoly Yakovenko's participation as a strategic investor signals alignment between Trace's cross-border infrastructure ambitions and Solana's positioning as a preferred settlement layer for global stablecoin payments. USDC — Trace's primary settlement asset — is one of Solana's dominant stablecoins, and Solana processed an adjusted $650 billion in stablecoin volume in February 2026 alone. Latin America is among the highest-growth corridors for stablecoin adoption, driven by currency volatility in Argentina and Brazil and the growth of regional remittance markets.

As Trace scales its stablecoin settlement layer and develops new settlement products on top of its regulated banking foundation, Solana's low fees and high throughput make it a natural candidate for the routing layer between Brazilian PIX flows and global recipients. Its institutional customer base — which includes exchanges and payment companies with existing Solana exposure — creates a natural pathway for Solana-settled stablecoin volume to flow through Trace's infrastructure.