“Every non-custodial wallet today, the call to action is buy. … At the end of that five, 10 minutes of onboarding, you finally see a PIX ID. You send a thousand reais, you end up buying USDC or USDT, and you now have 950 in it. So your first experience using crypto is losing money.”
Bankless · Crypto & Web3 · November 2026
Context
Serrano was explaining why a self-custody wallet had poor conversion and retention in Latin America, contrasting it with fintech apps where the first button is deposit rather than buy. Ripio, his company and a sponsor of the episode, sells local stablecoin on-ramps meant to fix this.
Transcript
…all these countries. And that is what allows us. I feel like we have been working a decade into building all this plumbing to be able to offer, like to tokenize all these stablecoins, which I think is a key piece of infrastructure for the next phase of crypto. And there's not being a simple right.
…So you just said that you've been through all of these companies and you have all of the licenses and the regulatory requirements. What does that get you? What purchase does that get you in Latin America: in these days? Why does having all of these licenses important? What does that enable for you?
…very large company, decent team, like what is going on? And then we realize that what was happening is that if you open a non-custodial wallet, the call to action is very different from what a fintech will do. If you open Nubank, Brevolo, Mercado Pabo, the first call to action is deposit. The button is even in a different color. You open MetaMask, TrustWallet, Coinbase Wallet, WarApp, whatever. Every non-custodial wallet today, the call to action is buy. You click buy, there is a bunch of on-ramps that appear. You click that. You had to go into an onboarding that takes five, 10 minutes. You do that. Let's say you're a Brazilian. At the end of that five, 10 minutes of onboarding, you finally see a PIX ID. You send a thousand Rails and then you end up buying it or USDC or UZT. And you now have 950 in it. So your first experience using crypto is…
I think that's a universal experience for crypto people, especially in self-custodial wallets. There's a problem that we still really frequently have not solved. If I want to fund a non-custodial wallet, the KYC process is completely borked. Like one in 10 chance that I get it correct. And then if…
Yeah, so you pay FX and spreads. You want to go back, you pay again. So you now end up with 900. So how do we fix that? And we started to think, well, we need to fix this. And how do we fix this? And we saw, well, first we need to make the onboarding one-to-one. So the user has to pay zero fees on…
trying to be defensive, to put your point earlier. They're being defensive with their capital rather than speculative.
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