RIO DE JANEIRO — The BeInCrypto Stage returned to Píer Mauá for the fourth consecutive year at Rio Innovation Week 2026, and Wednesday morning made one thing clear: the distance between traditional finance and digital assets is no longer measured in ideology, but in integration. Banks, exchanges, card networks, and custody giants shared the same physical stage, announcing products and debating the rules of engagement for Brazil’s next phase of crypto adoption.
What emerged was not a single narrative, but a set of converging movements: a data-heavy report on Latin American capital flight, Binance’s first Brazil-only yield product, a sober discussion about stablecoin risk, and a new frontier in prediction markets. The morning felt less like a crypto conference and more like a financial industry rehearsal for the coming decade.
BeInCrypto launches “The Exodus Economy”
The day’s intellectual anchor came from BeInCrypto Intelligence, which released the first edition of “The Exodus Economy,” a report that maps how Latin American money is finding a new financial home. The paper tracked 12 years of dollar flows on-chain, wallet by wallet, and cross-referenced 60 billionaire addresses against their Forbes profiles. It is a forensic exercise in tracing the ghost of capital as it moves across borders.
The report puts hard numbers behind a phenomenon usually told through headlines about millionaires leaving. According to the study, Brazilians hold US$654 billion abroad, by their own central bank’s count. Meanwhile, 26.9 million Latin Americans now live outside their home countries. The scale of remittances is equally striking: roughly US$63.2 billion was sent home to Mexico over the last 12 months, with a crypto rail already running at about half that size.
One of the more counterintuitive findings is that all 14 Mexican billionaires tracked still live at home. The exodus is real, but it is far from uniform. Wealth is not always fleeing; sometimes it is simply diversifying. That nuance matters for anyone trying to understand where Latin American finance is headed.
The report was reviewed alongside a Latin American Finance Council that includes Caio Fasanella, Head of Investments at Nomad; Antônia Souza, Director of Digital Currencies for Latin America and the Caribbean at Visa; Michael Rihani, Director of Crypto at Nubank; and Bruno Grossi, Head of Emerging Technologies at Banco Inter. The composition of that council itself is a signal: the conversation around capital movement now spans borderless neobanks, card networks, traditional banks, and crypto-native platforms.
Binance bets on Brazil with Rende+
If the Exodus Economy report described the problem, Binance came with a proposed answer. In the opening keynote, Thiago Sarandy, general manager of Binance in Brazil, announced Binance Rende+, the platform’s first yield product built exclusively for the Brazilian market. It is a real-denominated investment yielding 120% of the CDI, backed by Treasury bonds, with deposits of up to R$100,000 and daily returns that include Saturdays, Sundays, and holidays.
“Binance Rende+ combines features Brazilians already know, such as CDI-linked yield, with the advantages of digital assets, like earning 7 days a week, 24 hours a day, with the ability to redeem at any time. This significantly improves the potential of investors’ portfolios. People’s money can no longer be limited to business hours,” Sarandy said during the keynote “Everything Your Money Wants to Be: The Financial Superapps.”
The executive used the stage to reveal another line of expansion. Still in August, Binance will launch a tool in the Brazilian market that will let users buy stocks listed in the United States directly from the platform’s app, with access to more than 7,000 shares of U.S. companies. That move consolidates Binance’s evolution beyond crypto, gathering into a single ecosystem solutions such as Binance Card, Pix integration, the new Rende+, and soon, foreign equities.
The global figures Sarandy presented helped frame the scale behind the strategy. Binance today counts more than 325 million users, moved over US$34 trillion in trading volume throughout 2025, holds roughly US$160 billion in assets under custody, and can process up to 4.4 million transactions per second. He also stressed that the company is currently the crypto platform with the largest number of regulatory licenses across different jurisdictions worldwide.
For Brazilian users, the pre-launch list for Binance Rende+ is already open. But the deeper message was structural: Binance is no longer just an exchange. It is building a financial superapp that competes with banks on their own turf, while offering the global reach that traditional institutions often struggle to match.
Stablecoins and the tension between access and protection
If the Binance keynote placed the financial superapp at the center of the conversation, the panel “Money Never Sleeps Again: Stablecoins and the New Global Financial Infrastructure” brought the regulatory temperature into the debate. The table gathered Nelson Leite from Binance, Eduardo Abreu, vice president of Visa in Brazil, and Sabrina Zaparroli, Public Policy Senior Expert at Nubank, moderated by Luís de Magalhães, BeInCrypto’s Latin America lead.
Zaparroli offered one of the morning’s densest reflections when she addressed the supposed democratization of the dollar through stablecoins. For her, ease of access cannot be confused with the absence of risk.
“I see this democratization as an important reduction of barriers. For many people, especially in lower-value international transactions, the possibility of accessing a virtual asset referenced to a strong currency and moving it at any time can mean more predictability, more speed and less friction. But it is important not to confuse access with the absence of risk,” she said.
Zaparroli argued that democratizing access also means democratizing information and protection. A stablecoin does not automatically become equivalent to a dollar in a bank account merely because it maintains a value reference, she contended. Users need to understand the issuer’s obligations, how reserves are held, and what protection exists in the event of a failure.
“The simplicity of the interface cannot hide the nature of the product. We need to combine innovation with transparency, controls proportional to risk and communication that allows the client to make an informed decision,” she added.
The executive said she prefers to speak of more efficient access to dollar-denominated services, rather than an automatic replacement of the local currency. That distinction is subtle but critical, especially in a country where dollarization debates can quickly become political.
Eduardo Abreu, from Visa, highlighted the collaborative nature of the debate, which brought together companies from different links of the chain.
“It was a great experience to be in a place where you see innovation, content and networking with high-level people. And to be on a panel with companies from different sectors, right? Us as Visa, the bank as issuer, Binance as exchange. It is really cool and it shows how this world has to be collaborative,” said the vice president.
BNY and the infrastructure argument
The institutional view gained reinforcement in the remarks of Carlos Xirau, Head of Latin America at BNY, who tied the debate to the idea that mass adoption depends less on technology and more on solid foundations.
“We are living through the convergence between traditional finance and the digital economy. The mass adoption of digital assets will depend less on technology and more on the ability to create a robust and reliable infrastructure, capable of meeting the demands of investors, companies and financial institutions. That is the path to changing the market’s scalability,” Xirau said.
His words landed with particular weight because BNY is one of the oldest financial institutions in the world. When the custody giant says infrastructure matters more than innovation, it is not dismissing innovation; it is warning that without settlement reliability, legal clarity, and institutional-grade rails, the industry will remain a prisoner of its own volatility. The numbers behind The Exodus Economy report reinforce that point: capital moves where it feels safe, and safety is an infrastructure product.
Prediction markets enter the agenda
Another block that energized the stage was dedicated to prediction markets, a theme gaining ground in discussions about new financial primitives. The CEO of Rain Protocol summed up the stance he believes the sector must adopt toward a tool still under construction.
“Prediction markets are a new frontier. We need to understand how they work before jumping in. There are new and exciting possibilities ahead. To block this new tool is not the answer, to understand is,” the executive said.
He described prediction markets as a completely new market primitive, in which probabilities themselves become tradable assets, unlocking entirely new ways to price risk, coordinate information, and build financial products. That framing moves the conversation beyond sports betting or election gambling; it turns prediction markets into a fundamental mechanism for collective intelligence.
For the Rain Protocol CEO, Brazil embraced innovation throughout the event and holds the talent, curiosity, and entrepreneurial spirit to become one of the global leaders in shaping the future of the sector.
“The quality of the discussion reflected the energy and openness of the Brazilian community,” he said, in a closing note that echoed the mood of the morning.
The future is already being built in Brazilian Portuguese
Rio Innovation Week 2026 did not produce a single headline-grabbing announcement, but it revealed something more durable: the architecture of Latin American finance is being rebuilt in public, on stage, with all its tensions visible. The Exodus Economy report documents capital in motion. Binance Rende+ is an attempt to plant a flag in that motion. The stablecoin discussion is a reminder that access without protection is just another kind of risk. And prediction markets are a preview of how the next generation of financial primitives will be negotiated.
What happened in Rio was not a festival of hype. It was a series of quiet confirmations that the crypto industry in Latin America has moved from proving itself to building for the long term. The block confirmations will tell the real story, but on Wednesday morning, the direction of travel was unmistakable.