Trace Finance Raises $32M as Brazil’s FX Rules Push Banks to Stablecoins

Published by James Harris on June 17, 2026June 17, 2026

Trace Finance, a regulated payments infrastructure company built on stablecoin settlement, has raised $32 million in a Series A led by CoinFund, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Paxos, Chainlink Labs, and Haun Ventures, among others. The round will fund expansion from Brazil into broader Latin American and Asia-Pacific markets, with new stablecoin products designed to bridge local banking systems with global liquidity.

The investor list is not incidental. Circle co-founder Sean Neville, Solana Labs co-founder Anatoly Yakovenko, and Ricardo Villela Marino, partner and vice chairman at Itaú Unibanco (Latin America’s largest bank), all participated as individuals. Paxos and Chainlink Labs joining as institutional backers signals that the infrastructure layer for stablecoin settlement is attracting players with direct commercial interest in seeing that infrastructure scale. The combined weight of regulated stablecoin payment volume now being assembled across several competing entities suggests this is a land-grab moment, not a product launch. Trace’s CEO Bernardo Brites noted that the company’s valuation has risen nearly tenfold since its 2022 seed round led by HOF Capital, which itself returned for this round.

The detail that changes the read here: Brazil recently reclassified cross-border digital asset transfers as foreign exchange operations, pushing institutional volume toward licensed banking providers and away from non-bank alternatives. Trace built its compliance stack inside that regulatory environment before the rule existed.

That timing matters more than the raise itself. Regulatory reclassification in Brazil is the kind of structural shift that creates durable moats for whoever is already embedded in the local banking system, and locks out entrants who have to retrofit compliance after the fact. Trace claims to be the primary infrastructure provider for four of the largest global payment companies active in Latin America, including dLocal, and has processed over $10 billion in cumulative cross-border volume. Scaling that model across multiple jurisdictions with divergent FX regulations and varying approaches to on-chain settlement integration is a different problem than dominating a single, well-understood market. As Brites put it in the press release: “Stablecoins alone do not solve cross-border payments. Stablecoins plus regulated local bank infrastructure does.”

The expansion targets, Latin America, the United States, and Asia-Pacific, span three distinct regulatory regimes. Each will require the kind of banking partnerships and compliance architecture that took years to build in Brazil. The company’s track record gives it credibility with institutional clients, but credibility in one market does not transfer automatically, and the jurisdictions on its target list are not known for fast regulatory onboarding of crypto-adjacent infrastructure.