Thiago Cesar is the 34-year-old co-founder of Transfero, a company 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, Cesar says, 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.
What inspired you to start Transfero?
Transfero was a joint dream between me and my four Brazilian co-founders. We met in Rio de Janeiro just after I returned from the University of London in 2015, where coincidentally, I wrote my master’s thesis about Bitcoin.
One of my co-founders, Marlyson Silva, had previous experience in the payments industry and developed a payment gateway that could also process Bitcoin transactions. The system immediately converted Bitcoin into reais, so merchants didn’t have to worry about price fluctuations.
Being a crypto-native group, our idea was to leverage everything that a borderless and permissionless asset class could provide. Brazil and other neighboring countries were always financially limited in some way: be it due to inflation-inducing economic policy like in Argentina, or a rigid FX market with some degree of capital controls like in Brazil.
Crypto can fill multiple gaps for citizens coming from emerging markets. Asset protection, international remittance rails, portfolio diversification and so on. Transfero builds on top of legacy financial technologies in LATAM — such as PIX in Brazil — and combines the abovementioned crypto elements to deliver products and services that solve real-world pains that are common in emerging markets.
What are the biggest things Transfero is doing?
Transfero is one of the largest fiat ramps in Brazil and Argentina. Multiple international businesses — crypto and non-crypto related — use Transfero to receive deposits and perform payments within the…
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