RealFi Meets Real Payments, Real Settlement, Real World - Buenos Aires 2025

[music] You know, over the last month, uh, I've been asked about my thoughts on payments in Latin America, and I get the sense that people expect me to open up with this flashy statistic or some big state of the industry proclamation. Um, but the place I always start and the place that keeps me grounded is this simple idea. Money moves people long before people move money. Financial systems shape lives. They define what's possible for families.

They decide how fast a business can grow, how stable a community becomes, and how vibrant a region's economy feels. And for decades, these systems have been well, honestly, structured like private clubs. They're exclusive. They're expensive. And they're architected around the needs of institutions, not the needs of people.

The reason why we're in this room today and the reason why funding the commons exists is because we feel that tension. We know that if infrastructure beneath people's economic lives doesn't change, then nothing else will. So today, let's talk about what happens when you put open rails, public goods, and real world financial use cases at the center of an ecosystem. Let's talk about realy, not as a buzzword, but as a blueprint for how money should move in the real world. Across Latin America, the financial baseline that billions of decisions sit on top of is fundamentally uneven.

250 million adults are unbanked, not because they're unmotivated, but because the cost, the distance, and documentation requirements shut them out. 40% of GDP is informal. Entire economies are running without safety nets, proof of income or the ability to access credit and crossber fees are above 6% on average. The remittance for a son that's working in Baltimore to a mother in Buenosire can lose a week's worth of groceries just in friction costs alone. This isn't just data points.

This is a design failure. A failure of Rails, not a failure of people. And the thing about Rails is if they're slow, everything becomes slow. If they're expensive, people become poorer. And if they're closed, everyone becomes dependent.

Latam forces us to confront the real consequences of financial exclusion. Not in academic terms, not in think tank reports, but in the day-to-day realities of the micro merchant that can't get paid digitally, the small exporter that's stuck waiting 3 to 5 days for settlement, and the family that loses that same 6 to 15% just to move money across a border. This is where real matters most, not as a shiny category label, but as a response to practical problems that people feel every single day. There we go. So, if DeFi was a breakthrough, that proved that global scale that we can have open programmable money that's more adaptable than legacy rails.

It proved that liquidity can be created by communities, not just institutions, and that borderlessness is not a dream. It's a protocol design choice. But there's still something that DeFi hasn't yet done and it wasn't designed to do at the start and that's to connect directly to the realities of the people in the informal economy that small trader that street vendor or that crossber worker right and that's where reali starts to enter the picture if defi shows what's financially possible real shows what's actually useful focuses on stable value instead of speculative vol volatility. It focuses on compliance ready pathways instead of isolated ecosystems. End user user experience instead of developer only tooling.

Interoperability with institutions instead of separating from them. Jobs, remittances, trade, savings, the fundamentals that upgrade daily life. And that spectrum between DeFi to realy is not a contradiction. It's an evolution. It's learning from the experiments of years past and translating them into infrastructure that serves millions, not just the early adopters.

Here's a simple but radical thought in three parts. Financial infrastructure is a public good. Public goods require open rails. And open rails require ecosystems, not empires. When you build financial systems the way you build public roads, a few things happen.

Everyone can use them. Anyone can build on them. Nobody needs permission. And innovation happens at the edges, not in eco chambers. Public Rails let an NGO deploy cash assistance next to FinTechs that are deploying payments, next to academic groups that are building identity pro protocols.

They're all in the same infrastructure and they don't have to reinvent these fundamentals in order to advance. But there's still a nuance here. So if your rails are public in one country but then gated in the next, you actually don't have rails. You have silos. You have islands that are pretending to be continents.

The future real depends on a truly open crossber interoperable rails. And that's where Stellar's core architecture, governance model, and ecosystem all align. We're not building private lanes and public parks. We're building an actual public highway system for value. All right, this is my favorite part.

So, all right, [clears throat] because this is where all of the theory on real starts to become reality across the stellar ecosystem today. What you're seeing here is regulated licensed on-ramps that connect local currency to global rails. You're seeing stable coin corridors that are running through Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, and more. You're seeing payment rails that settle in seconds instead of days. You're seeing merchant tools that reduce fees for the smallest traders.

You're seeing remittance platforms that [clears throat] reduce the cost down to basis points, not percentages. And you're seeing crossber settlement APIs that abstract blockchain jargon for even the most traditional fintex to participate. You're seeing developer tooling that lowers the barrier for builders that are entering the space. This isn't one company that's acting as a gatekeeper. This is many independent actors.

The wallets, fintex, nos, merchants, builders, they're all contributing to a shared backbone. it starts to look less like a crypto community and more like an internet of value where everyone picks up a different part of the work. So if you want real to scale, you do need protocols, not platforms. Now protocols give us four things. Predictability because standards outlast startups.

You get upgrade paths because ecosystems evolve in the open. You get common safety rails because everyone benefits when compliance and security become shared responsibilities. And you get crossber reach because protocols don't stop at custom gate borders. The world keeps trying to solve financial inclusion on proprietary platforms, but those platforms, they come and they go. incentive changes, APIs close, pricing adjusts, and their priorities just ultimately shift.

But protocols don't behave like that. Protocols behave like basic utilities that the world depends on. They're simple, they're sturdy, they're neutral, and they're universal. And every time a new builder plugs into an open protocol, the whole network gets a lot more valuable. Not because someone shipped a feature, but because someone added their participation value directly into the network.

So here's a real engine of real and the part that feels like magic once you start to unpack some of these concentric circles. So when you lower the cost of building, a few things happen. You standardize the rails and then you open up global liquidity and then you give developers a stable foundation and now suddenly everything starts to speed up and accelerate. Builders are creating products for real users. Users are creating transaction volume that reflects real economic behavior.

That volume starts to signal demand. And that attracts even more builders. And the more builders that create more competition, it creates more robustness and more redundancy. And then the ecosystem starts to become anti-fragile, stronger because more people join. And there's a beautiful twist here.

Impact isn't just a separate branch of this flywheel. Impact is the flywheel. Every time a user gets a cheaper remittance, every time a merchant gets paid instantly, every time a small exporter gets cash flow unlocked, that's not a side effect. That's the system working as intended. Realize flywheel is not just powered by speculation.

It's powered by participation. When we talk about why Latan matters, it's not because this is a so-called emerging market. Um, it's because it's a frontline market. This is a market where necessity fuels innovation faster than novelty ever could. In Latan, people skip generations of legacy infrastructure.

Digital native financial behavior is normal, not aspirational. Stable value is an investment strategy, but it's also survival. Cash and digital pathways resolve real friction, not just theoretical problems. And mobile first economies mean that real builders move faster than their incumbents. This region pushes real technologies to their limits, asking questions like how low can fees actually go?

How fast can settlement actually work? How accessible can UX actually become? And how interoperable can systems realistically be across borders? Latam isn't the test market. It's the proving ground.

When something works in LATAM, you know it can scale globally. I give you all an invitation and a bit of a challenge. Join open ecosystems. Build tools that serve real people and help create public goods that move money as easily as moving a message. Because the world doesn't need more financial products necessarily.

It needs financial foundations. It needs reliable wages. It needs crossber dignity. It needs instant settlement for the smallest merchants. It needs savings options that don't erode overnight.

It needs rails that don't punish people for being poor. Defi proved what's possible, but reali proves what's useful. And if we do this right, if we stay focused on the real world, we can together build systems that lift entire regions, not just our own portfolios. So that's the work. Uh that's the mission and that is why we're all here together.

Thank you. [applause]