EN | How Stablecoins Are Transforming Payments and Unlocking New Markets | MERGE Madrid 2025

Good afternoon. Um, my name is Gabriel Zulani. I lead the revenue and sales for Bits of Business. Uh, I hope you enjoyed a bit of this last second confusion about the mic, but I'm glad I'm here to talk to you about uh what we do at Bits of Business. Who is Bits of Business and what do we do?

I wish they gave me also the slide remote. Okay, this is interesting. Um anyway um what Bits of Business is and what Bits of Business does. Um we are an infrastructure crossber painting company um born and focus on Latama markets from Mexico into Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Chile recently. Um we were born Thank you.

We were born uh uh 11 years ago as a company in Mexico and uh our mission originally was to be just a crypto exchange. I say just but we ended up being the largest crypto exchange in LATAM. Um the idea of the B2B side which is what bits of business is about came up almost four years ago out of a necessity of what we see in the markets in Latin in Latin America. So and the necessity was we live in what it is commonly referred to as the global south. The global south is anyone uh working and dealing with the currencies that are not in the G10 currencies and therefore they don't have really huge liquid uh trading markets.

So the global south is clearly latam is clearly Africa. So for anyone has in a company or needs for payments in these two massive regions, the only access to global trade and global finance is going through the dollar and then settling in dollars or getting to another currency which is not trivial as a business. Why? Because you have if you are in a smaller country you have your own domestic bank needs to have a relationship with another bank which is a regional bank which needs to have a relationship with the US banks and then continue the journey which means the journey is probably very several days long in terms of settlement times is very obscure in terms of fees and it is not a predictable efficient experience. for your merchant and for your customers.

So that's the genesis in how the idea of dealing with crossber payments in LATAM came about. So it is is hardly a news that this um new rays because not even an industry are new payment rays are now really doubling and tripling almost every month because they solve a real problem. So, and I wanted to give you a a bit of a view of, you know, what problems are we talking about because sometimes people that are new to the industry get a sense of, yeah, this is very fancy, but you know, we live in the real world. So, is this one really helpful? Yes, it is.

So, I mentioned already the volatility of the currencies in our region like also in Africa. For example, if you receive payments in Mexican pesos and your headquarter is in the US or in Europe, you need to collect Mexican pesos, transfer it to dollars, moving to another bank from that account, move it from that account in dollars to another account somewhere else. So for this one, you very likely engage with two or three different banks and it takes days and you cannot offer a reliable u fees or effects to your customer. You let's take in this case you are a PSP through stable coins. What do you do actually?

You use your local what we call on-ramp which means you collect the payment in local fiat. you instantly transfer that one into one of the two largest used US pegged stable coins USDT or USDC in seconds and in seconds you can decide to send those USDT or USDC somewhere else on the chain or do the offramp in the other currency in another part of the planet. In the past this was days, now it is minutes. So if your business as a psp is to offer this service to your merchant, you clearly understand how much advantage you have in terms of floating and liquidity versus the traditional model. So this is as and is still dramatically changing the value proposition for the PSP to their merchants.

We are the infrastructure behind any of the big players in this industry. They are either a customer of ours or they are talking to us and they use a v variety of combination which is the on-ramp and the effects the offramp or they can do just the effects in the middle. Another huge case is is the one of course of money transmitters. Uh we happen to be sitting in the largest corridor on the planet for FX which is the USD to MXN US dollars to Mexican pesos. That's the number one corridor on the planet.

Period. That corridor is worth $60 billion a year. On that corridor uh bits already moves 10% of those volumes through stable coins to do from USD to MXN. Why you would you wonder if all the major banks on the planet already in that corridor because they have interest. So why we do that?

Because it's not a war of either or meaning you either do with the banks or you do with stable coins is actually a combination of both. Wherever you find efficiencies in fees, in times in service, you can decide which flows you take through the banking rails. We swift the correspondent banking and which flows you take to our race. So, and in terms of efficiency, bear in mind with our phone in the pocket, we think that we have bank access 247. Well, when it happens that you are remitting money, that word doesn't exist yet.

It is become impossible, but it doesn't exist. Meaning if your bank closes at 5 on Friday and you want to send money, you need to find a way to send them money after night or Saturday or Sunday. Otherwise, you don't have a solution and your customer need to wait until Monday to get the money on the other side. This is what stable coins enables every single day and that's why we get 10% of those volumes in LATAM and from the US to Mexico. Clearly, there are also traders and gaming.

These two were native into the crypto world because they saw the opportunity in speed and efficiency and in fees to trade in a different channel versus the banking channel since early days of this business. Uh there is another one that I think it is going to be big and uh I think we should pay attention which is treasury. Many company are international, multinational and therefore they need to collect money and they have position in multiple currency around the world. Through stable coins they can have a centralized treasury then they can get on and off from any currency in seconds without having the need to have deposits in their account. So we we were very fast today but I wanted to leave you with a couple of example that maybe resonate to you in terms of brands and things we enable in LATAM.

The first one is um I spoke about this one but I wanted to talk about what we do with the new innovation. For example, there are companies like Clara that does payments and is using our services as really sort of the guarantor of the credit they giving to companies for doing corporate spending. This is very new and the frontiers of the things that are happening are really really limitless. Another one is clearly a need of um paying developers globally. It's a massive need for company that facilitate those kind of contracts.

How they pay these people located everywhere on the planet 247 through stable coins. We are enabing one of the biggest player in town which is high club to do this one in Brazil, in Colombia, Argentina, in Mexico instantly in any regardless the currency and where the people sit on on their work. So in uh in in in essence you have to see this one is uh not just a pure effects crossber payments because the winning factor in my view is the combination of the two things. You have to be able to offer not just the inefficient 247 effects. You need to combine that one with the ability to disperse the payment if it is a payout or to collect if it is a payin in the local markets because every single market has a different a infrastructure a different banking system a different rules.

So we built this one over the years in a way where we are directly connecting our customers to the local a networks at the same speed we can do the effects we can execute the pay in and payout. This combination of the two makes us very unique and powerful for taking care of the entire payment from the beginning till the end. And I hope you will find this one uh interesting and um and thank you very much for your attention.