Inside MERGE São Paulo: On-the-Ground Coverage from BeInCrypto

São Paulo delivered the conversations. The city itself, less so.

As an official media partner, BeInCrypto was on the ground for all of it. Our LATAM Team Lead, Luis Magalhães, led our presence at the event, conducting exclusive interviews, joining panel discussions, and ensuring our audience across Portuguese, Spanish, and global platforms had full access to the conversations shaping the region’s crypto landscape.

Here is what the week looked like from where we were standing.

What Stood Out on the Floor

MERGE São Paulo drew a crowd that is genuinely hard to find at most conferences in this space. The people in the room were builders, operators, and capital allocators who had done the reading and put in the hours. No wristband queue stretching around the block. No shouting over a DJ at 2 p.m. just to exchange a business card.

What gave the event its edge on a packed conference calendar was the company mix. Regulated institutions, self-custody infrastructure companies, and fintechs processing real payment volume, all in the same room, conversing and bouncing off of ideas. Which makes the crossover even more rare, and Brazil needs more of it.

The event was also the right size. Big enough to feel significant and small enough to run into the same interesting person three times in a day.

On-Ground Leadership and Exclusive Interviews

BeInCrypto conducted exclusive interviews with key figures across traditional finance, decentralized infrastructure, and fintech, including:

• Stijn Vander Straeten, CEO at Crypto Finance. Check out the exclusive interview here.
• André Portilho, Head of Digital Assets at BTG Pactual. Check out the exclusive interview here.

On the Panel Stage

Beyond the interviews, Luis also took the stage as a moderator at the event’s invitation-only Institutional Summit. There, he led the panel ‘Stablecoins in Practice: Real-World Use Cases Across Brazil’s Fintech Ecosystem’, bringing together Carlos Jiménez, BD and Partnerships Manager at Rain; Pedro Barreiro, Director of Banking at Nomad; and Marcos Nunes, CEO at Tangem Pay. 

The high-level conversation discussed how stablecoins are reshaping financial infrastructure across the region, pain points and opportunities both for traditional finance institutions and DeFi companies.

During the second day of event, the executive was in the panel on ‘Tokenized Money: CBDCs, Tokenized Deposits and the Future of Digital Liquidity’, with Jaime Pradenas Baeza, Head of Financial Technology Hub at Banco Central de Chile; Bruno Grossi, Head of Digital Assets at Inter; and Nayam Hanashiro, Head Strategic Projects and Digital Public Goods at LNET. 

The conversations touched upon several use cases of tokenized money in the region and how big regulators and neobanks are reshaping the whole industry. 

São Paulo Is a Hard City

No event recap from MERGE São Paulo would be complete without addressing the elephant in the room, which is not the conference itself but the city hosting it.

São Paulo is a megalopolis, and it moves like one. Navigating between the main venue and side events across different neighborhoods is not a short ride. It is traffic, distance, and the particular exhaustion of a city that was not built for pedestrian spontaneity. For a conference where a significant portion of the real deal-making happens at satellite events, that friction matters.

Side events saw thinner attendance than they deserved. Scheduling collisions were harder to manage. The informal energy that makes side events worth attending, the accidental run-ins, the dinners that stretch past midnight, the conversation that starts between venues and ends in a partnership, all of it was a little more expensive in time and effort than it needed to be.

This is not a criticism of the MERGE team. The curation, the programming, and the community they are building around TradFi-DeFi convergence in Brazil are all genuinely worth your time. But the best moments at conferences like this happen in the margins, and São Paulo has a way of making those margins costly. 

The event deserves a city that gets out of its way. Rio de Janeiro, with its more compressed geography and easier movement between neighbourhoods, comes to mind. So does a smaller city entirely.

Worth Attending. Just Come Prepared.

MERGE São Paulo is a good event. That is the honest, simple verdict. The conversations are real, the audience is serious, and the TradFi-DeFi crossover it is facilitating in the Brazilian market is one of the more compelling stories in regional crypto right now.

If you are planning to attend future editions, do yourself a favour: map your side events in advance, build in extra travel time, and accept that the city will cost you at least one conversation you were hoping to have. Go for the right reasons, and MERGE will deliver.

For continued coverage of Brazil’s evolving crypto and fintech landscape, follow us at beincrypto.com/pt-br and across our Spanish-language platforms.

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