Latin America’s CBDC Pow-Wow: When Central Banks Try to Teach Stablecoins How to Small Talk

On the 19th, the MERGE São Paulo summit gathered central bankers, multilateral reps and fintech heads to hash out asset tokenisation and digital money in Latin America—basically, a crypto group therapy session where everyone agrees blockchain is cool but nobody wants to be the one who actually runs the node. The panel – “Tokenization of Money: CBDCs, Tokenized Deposits and the Future of Digital Liquidity” – featured Bruno Grossi (Inter’s head of digital assets, the guy who still believes AMMs will one day not front-run your grandma’s pension), Jaime Pradenas Baeza (head of the fintech hub at the Central Bank of Chile, who speaks in proverbs but codes in Rust), and Nayam Hanashiro (strategic projects lead at LNET, the quiet genius who probably has a GitHub repo named “crypto-but-make-it-boring”), with Luis De Magalhães of BeInCrypto steering the conversation like a guy trying to calm down three degens at a Binance Live stream.

Fragmentation is the real villain
Grossi warned that today’s financial stack is a patchwork of incompatible tech—like trying to use a Nintendo Switch controller to operate a Boeing 737. He pitched tokenised money—assets turned into blockchain-registered tokens—as a “lingua franca” that could let stablecoins and tokenised central-bank money speak the same language, smoothing settlement across cities, borders and banks. In other words: imagine if USDC and a Brazilian CBDC could high-five instead of side-eyeing each other like exes at a crypto conference.

Chile’s regulator takes a historic view
Pradenas Baeza reminded the room that payment innovation is nothing new; it’s just the next chapter in money’s evolution—like when your grandpa switched from bartering goats to using paper receipts he didn’t understand. Chile’s central bank ran a proof-of-concept to settle tokenised assets with wholesale central-bank money, without launching a public digital currency. He also cited an IMF taxonomy that maps DLT-based settlement models, from pure-central-bank platforms to hybrid private-public mixes. “Money is trust, in the end,” he summed up—which, if you think about it, is just a fancy way of saying “we still believe in central banks, but maybe with better UX.”

Drex: Brazil’s digital experiment hits a pause
Grossi detailed Brazil’s Drex project, which piloted a CBDC with 16 financial institutions across two phases. The trials exposed immature privacy tools on Ethereum, prompting Brazil to shelve the blockchain component for now and focus on a simpler, non-blockchain digital currency use case aimed at liquidity and asset-transfer challenges. “Drex is an experiment to create a new financial system using new technologies,” he said. Translation: they tried to build a Lamborghini with IKEA parts, got a squeaky wheel and a broken seatbelt, and now they’re building a very well-documented bicycle instead.

Regional cooperation goes open-source
Hanashiro introduced CB Web3, an IDB Lab initiative run by LNET that ropes in 12 Latin American and Caribbean central banks to issue, redeem and test digital-currency use cases, including cross-border payments. The code and learnings will be released as a digital public good for private-sector and community use. CEMLA and FLAR are also on board. While Chile’s formal participation wasn’t confirmed, Pradenas Baeza noted ongoing experience-sharing, especially around Drex lessons. It’s like a regional DAO where the only rule is “no one gets to be the CEO,” and everyone’s just trying not to get rug-pulled by their own bureaucracy.

The ticking question for the next 12 months
When pressed on the most urgent issue, Hanashiro flagged the need to balance private-sector speed (stablecoins, deposit tokens) with public-institutional tracks while safeguarding digital sovereignty and stability. Pradenas Bae