BeInCrypto Stage at Rio Innovation Week: Where TradFi and Crypto Meet

The BeInCrypto Stage returned to Píer Mauá for the fourth year in a row at Rio Innovation Week 2026, turning Wednesday morning into a showcase of the agenda now drawing banks, exchanges, and card issuers closer together. 

Executives from companies including Binance, Visa, Nubank, BNY, Crypto.com, Mercado Bitcoin, and Bitso, among others, shared the stage to discuss stablecoins, financial superapps, prediction markets, and the infrastructure underpinning the next phase of digital assets in the country.

BeInCrypto launches “The Exodus Economy” report

BeInCrypto opened its own chapter of the day by unveiling “The Exodus Economy,” the first edition of a research effort by BeInCrypto Intelligence that maps how Latin American money finds a new financial home. The study followed 12 years of dollar flows on-chain, wallet by wallet, and audited 60 billionaire addresses against their Forbes profiles.

The report puts hard numbers behind a phenomenon usually told through headlines about departing millionaires. According to the study, Brazilians hold US$ 654 billion abroad, by their own central bank’s count, and 26.9 million Latin Americans already live outside their home countries. It also shows that roughly US$ 63.2 billion was sent home to Mexico over the last 12 months, with a crypto rail beside it already running at about half that size. One of its more counterintuitive findings is that all 14 Mexican billionaires tracked still live at home, evidence that the exodus is real but far from uniform.

The edition was reviewed alongside a Latin American Finance Council that includes Caio Fasanella, Head of Investments at Nomad, Antônia Souza, Director of Digital Currencies for Latin America and the Caribbean at Visa, Michael Rihani, Director of Crypto at Nubank, and Bruno Grossi, Head of Emerging Technologies at Banco Inter.

Binance unveils its first Brazil-only yield product on stage

The tone was set in the opening keynote. Thiago Sarandy, general manager of Binance in Brazil, took the stage to announce Binance Rende+, the platform’s first yield product built exclusively for the Brazilian market. It is a real-denominated investment yielding 120% of the CDI, backed by Treasury bonds, allowing deposits of up to R$ 100,000 and delivering daily returns that include Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays.

“Binance Rende+ combines features Brazilians already know, such as CDI-linked yield, with the advantages of digital assets, like earning 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, with the ability to redeem at any time. This significantly improves the potential of investors’ portfolios. People’s money can no longer be limited to business hours,” Sarandy said during the keynote “Everything Your Money Wants to Be: The Financial Superapps.”

The executive used the stage to reveal another line of expansion. Still in August, Binance will launch a tool in the Brazilian market that will let users buy stocks listed in the United States directly from the platform’s app, with access to more than 7,000 shares of U.S. companies.

According to Sarandy, the move consolidates Binance’s evolution beyond the crypto market, gathering into a single ecosystem solutions such as Binance Card, Pix integration, the new Binance Rende+ and, soon, investment in foreign equities.

The global figures he presented helped frame the scale behind the strategy. Binance today counts more than 325 million users, moved over US$ 34 trillion in trading volume throughout 2025, holds roughly US$ 160 billion in assets under custody, and can process up to 4.4 million transactions per second.

Sarandy also stressed that the company is currently the crypto platform with the largest number of regulatory licenses across different jurisdictions worldwide. Those interested in Binance Rende+ can already

Stablecoins and the tension between access and protection

If the Binance keynote placed the financial superapp at the center of the conversation, the panel “Money Never Sleeps Again: Stablecoins and the New Global Financial Infrastructure” brought the regulatory temperature into the debate. The table gathered Nelson Leite, from Binance, Eduardo Abreu, vice president of Visa in Brazil, and Sabrina Zaparroli, Public Policy Senior Expert at Nubank, moderated by Luís de Magalhães, BeInCrypto’s Latin America lead.

BeInCrypto Stage at Rio Innovation Week. Source: BeInCrypto

Sabrina Zaparroli, from Nubank, offered one of the morning’s densest reflections when she addressed the supposed democratization of the dollar through stablecoins. For her, ease of access cannot be confused with the absence of risk.

“I see this democratization as an important reduction of barriers. For many people, especially in lower-value international transactions, the possibility of accessing a virtual asset referenced to a strong currency and moving it at any time can mean more predictability, more speed and less friction. But it is important not to confuse access with the absence of risk,” she said.

Zaparroli argued that democratizing access also means democratizing information and protection. She contended that a stablecoin does not automatically become equivalent to a dollar in a bank account merely because it maintains a value reference, and that users need to understand the issuer’s obligations, how reserves are held, and what protection exists in the event of a failure.

“The simplicity of the interface cannot hide the nature of the product. We need to combine innovation with transparency, controls proportional to risk and communication that allows the client to make an informed decision,” she added.

The executive said she prefers to speak of more efficient access to dollar-denominated services, rather than an automatic replacement of the local currency.

Eduardo Abreu, from Visa, highlighted the collaborative nature of the debate, which brought together companies from different links of the chain.

“It was a great experience to be in a place where you see innovation, content and networking with high-level people. And to be on a panel with companies from different sectors, right? Us as Visa, the bank as issuer, Binance as exchange. It is really cool and it shows how this world has to be collaborative,” said the vice president.

BNY and the infrastructure argument

The institutional view gained reinforcement in the remarks of Carlos Xirau, Head of Latin America at BNY, who tied the debate to the idea that mass adoption depends less on technology and more on solid foundations.

“We are living through the convergence between traditional finance and the digital economy. The mass adoption of digital assets will depend less on technology and more on the ability to create a robust and reliable infrastructure, capable of meeting the demands of investors, companies and financial institutions. That is the path to changing the market’s scalability,” Xirau said.

Prediction markets enter the agenda

Another block that energized the stage was the one dedicated to prediction markets, a theme gaining ground in discussions about new financial primitives. The CEO of Rain Protocol summed up the stance he believes the sector must adopt toward a tool still under construction.

“Prediction markets are a new frontier. We need to understand how they work before jumping in. There are new and exciting possibilities ahead. To block this new tool is not the answer, to understand is,” the executive said.

He described prediction markets as a completely new market primitive, in which probabilities themselves become tradable assets, unlocking entirely new ways to price risk, coordinate information, and build financial products.

For the Rain Protocol CEO, Brazil embraced innovation throughout the event and holds the talent, curiosity, and entrepreneurial spirit to become one of the global leaders in shaping the future of the sector.

“The quality of the discussion reflected the energy and openness of the Brazilian ecosystem,” he noted.

An agenda that cements the convergence

The fourth edition of the BeInCrypto Stage at Rio Innovation Week confirmed the movement running through every panel: the border between traditional finance and digital assets is growing ever thinner. On one side, exchanges such as Binance are advancing into fixed-income products and equities. On the other hand, banks and issuers like Nubank and Visa are folding stablecoins and onchain rails into their operations, while institutions such as BNY defend infrastructure as the precondition for scale.

To read “The Exodus Economy” report, click here.

The message that emerged from Píer Mauá is that the conversation is no longer about whether convergence will happen, but about how to build it with transparency, user protection, and rules proportional to risk.

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