{"podcast":{"title":"Brazil Crypto Report","slug":"brazil-crypto-report-5342676","podcast_index_feed_id":5342676,"rss_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/388673.rss","website_url":"https://bitsborders.substack.com/podcast","image_url":"https://substackcdn.com/feed/podcast/388673/5b4c1c49a82b03a61c347312e72cc41e.jpg","author":"Aaron Stanley","episode_count":190,"summary":"A media brand exploring frontier tech in frontier markets, with a unique focus on Brazil and Latin America","last_synced_at":"2026-07-13T06:18:34.761735+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/brazil-crypto-report-5342676"},"episode":{"title":"#187: He Left Visa to Build Caliza with Ezra Kebrab","slug":"187-he-left-visa-to-build-caliza-with-ezra-kebrab","published_at":"2026-06-26T19:22:43+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/brazil-crypto-report-5342676/187-he-left-visa-to-build-caliza-with-ezra-kebrab","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/brazil-crypto-report-5342676","url":"https://bitsborders.substack.com/p/187-he-left-visa-to-build-caliza","audio_url":"https://api.substack.com/feed/podcast/203739228/d5623b5309ba8926206e5592c5252f89.mp3","summary":"Hey everyone! I caught up with Caliza CEO Ezra Kebrab at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City earlier this month. We sat down to discuss how Caliza is helping companies move cross-border supplier and treasury payments , with most volume originating in Brazil and Mexico and flowing to China, Hong Kong, and the US. Kebrab’s path ran through a peer-to-peer wallet startup sold to Square in 2013 , then Visa , where he watched Pix and real-time payments take off in Brazil. 🙌 You can listen to Bits and Borders on your favorite podcast platform YouTube | Spotify | Apple Podcasts 🔥 Join our English language Telegram group to continue the conversation That experience exposed a gap: domestic rails kept improving while cross-border payments stayed stuck , which became the founding insight behind Caliza five years ago. * Caliza started as a traditional payments company, and the model has always been to marry stablecoin rails with traditional banking infrastructure rather than replace it. * After the 2023 banking crisis, Caliza decided to build its own licenses and banking partnerships rather than rely on intermediaries. * The company has grown consistently above 40% month over month, with 60% growth last month. * Customers range from customs and FX brokers without engineering teams to global API clients like Flutterwave, Skydo, and LianLian. * Kebrab pushes back on framing stablecoin players as “the Swift killer.” Swift has built strong standardization for supplier payments, and the r eal differentiation in cross-border isn’t the rail, it’s the workflow : tax codes, payment messaging, and local compliance criteria that determine whether goods clear customs. * On agentic commerce, Kebrab sees the near-term opportunity in back-office reconciliation, not consumer payments ,…","meta_description":"Hey everyone! I caught up with Caliza CEO Ezra Kebrab at the Bitso Stablecoin Conference in Mexico City earlier this month. We sat down to discuss how Cal…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":948,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/brazil-crypto-report-5342676/episodes/187-he-left-visa-to-build-caliza-with-ezra-kebrab/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/brazil-crypto-report-5342676/187-he-left-visa-to-build-caliza-with-ezra-kebrab.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}