When 12 Central Banks Form a DAO: Latin America's CBDC Coordination Layer

Yesterday in São Paulo, a crew not typically seen at a crypto conference—central bankers, multilateral suits, and private finance reps—gathered at MERGE São Paulo to discuss putting money on-chain. The panel, a sort of "regulator's rap battle," featured Bruno Grossi from Inter, Jaime Pradenas Baeza from Chile's central bank, and Nayam Hanashiro from LNET, with BeInCrypto's Luis De Magalhães keeping the peace.

Bruno Grossi diagnosed the financial system's main ailment as technological fragmentation, a real buzzkill for interoperability. He proposed tokenization as the potential "lingua franca" for blockchains—a common tech stack that could finally get tokenized central bank cash and those unruly stablecoins to coexist without constant bridge hacks. His thesis was this could grease the wheels for cross-border settlements and fund flows, making traditional finance look less like a Rube Goldberg machine.

Jaime Pradenas Baeza from Chile's central bank offered a history lesson, noting payment innovation is just money's latest software upgrade. His main query was the settlement layer for tokenized assets. Chile's central bank has already done its homework, running a proof-of-concept to settle tokenized assets using central bank money in a wholesale setting, cleverly avoiding the political minefield of a public retail CBDC for now.

He then shared the IMF's handy taxonomy for DLT settlements, ranging from "central bank only, no degens allowed" platforms to mixed public-private models. "Money is trust, in the end," he concluded, a statement that would make any Bitcoin maxi's eye twitch.

Grossi dove into Brazil's Drex project, a CBDC experiment that completed two test phases with 16 financial institutions. They hit a classic dev problem: the privacy solutions on Ethereum weren't ready for prime time. So, in a move familiar to any builder who has shipped an MVP, Brazil's central bank decided to pivot, developing a simpler, off-chain use case first while keeping the digital currency blueprint on ice to solve future liquidity puzzles.

Nayam Hanashiro presented CB Web3, an IDB Lab initiative run by LNET. Think of it as a testnet DAO for central banks: it brings together 12 monetary authorities from Latin America and the Caribbean to issue, redeem, and trial digital currency use cases, including the holy grail of cross-border settlements. With CEMLA and FLAR also in the guild, all code and learnings will be open-sourced as a digital public good—assuming they can agree on a GitHub repo.

Pradenas Baeza confirmed the regional central banks are indeed DMing each other, sharing notes with Brazil on Drex's lessons learned, though he stopped short of formally confirming Chile is lurking in the CB Web3 group chat.

When asked for the most pressing question for the next year, Hanashiro pointed to the delicate dance of letting the private sector (stablecoins, deposit tokens) innovate without the public institutional track tripping over it, all while trying to keep digital sovereignty and financial stability intact.

Pradenas Baeza highlighted the need to understand how the different flavors of digital money—CBDCs, stablecoins, tokenized deposits—will share the same wallet without causing a meltdown, including their respective risks and rewards. Grossi noted the tech stack still needs work, name-dropping automated market maker solutions as one of the tools that needs to evolve from a sketchy Uniswap v1 fork to something robust enough for central banks to trust.