Thiago Cesar is a 34-year-old co-founder of Transfero, a company that is helping to make crypto more accessible for Brazilians with BRZ, the first stablecoin pegged to the Brazilian real. Cesar grew up in southern Brazil’s Pindamonhangaba municipality before making the 90-mile trek to Sao Paulo for college. He graduated from Fundação Armando Alvares Penteado, and it wasn’t long before he became infatuated with Bitcoin as a graduate student at the University of London.
“By 2014, I’d been convinced that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, in general, were going to be a big thing,” Cesar says, leading him to author his graduate thesis on the “competitive and comparative advantages that Bitcoin could bring to a business.” In 2015, Transfero was born, leveraging everything that a borderless and permissionless asset class could provide.
Transfero is one of the largest fiat ramps in Brazil and Argentina, and multiple international businesses—crypto and non-crypto related—use Transfero to receive deposits and perform payments within the Brazilian and Argentine banking systems. Transfero is also the issuer of the BRZ stablecoin for BRL, a synthetic representation of BRZ as the actual BRL currency is non-deliverable. That means international companies can’t carry it unless they have bank accounts in Brazil.
Besides its financial services, Transfero has also started an educational program called Transfero Academy. It is aimed at vulnerable Brazilians and offers a full-time blockchain technical course, which prepares students for a career in crypto. The program has a 95% employment rate for its graduates.
Crypto has a higher adoption rate in Brazil than any other country in Latin America. Cesar attributes this to crypto’s ability to open up the international financial world to Brazilians. In Brazil, bank accounts can only be denominated in BRL, and retail traders can only trade stocks on a local exchange called B3. When Bitcoin, Ethereum, and stablecoins arrived, Brazilians could finally access international platforms and open up their financial horizons.
Cesar started buying Bitcoin in 2012 and was amazed by its potential for internationalizing money. He was convinced that Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies, in general, were going to be a big thing, leading him to focus on crypto for his master’s thesis. In the years to come, Cesar aims to expand Transfero throughout LATAM and become the main issuer of stablecoins and fiat ramp for the region, operating a settlement network between emerging markets.
