Why We Invested in Lumx: Building the Rails for Stablecoin Settlement in Latin America

Author: Doug Hsu, Investor

“No meio do caminho tinha uma pedra.”

“In the middle of the road, there was a stone.” 

— Carlos Drummond de Andrade

Moving money across borders has always been a rocky road, especially in Latin America. The obstacles have familiar names: correspondent banks, capital controls, settlement delays, volatile exchange rates. Each adds friction to what should be the simple act of sending value from A to B.

But the road is clearing. 

Stablecoins, once confined to crypto trading pairs and collateral pools, are now becoming the plumbing of global finance. Issuers can now mint and redeem with predictable liquidity. Moving money between blockchains no longer means a maze of “wrapped” assets or bridging workarounds. Regulatory clarity around on- and off-ramps has improved, and payment companies are quietly wiring stablecoin rails into their systems.

At CMT Digital, we believe stablecoins will continue to consume traditional payments, especially in high FX, cross-border heavy economies like Brazil. In the United States, Bridge.xyz hid the complexity of stablecoin custody, banking, and deposit rails behind clean APIs. Lumx is bringing that same abstraction layer to Latin America.

Our investment in Lumx builds on CMT Digital’s broader thesis that the next wave of adoption will be driven by infrastructure that abstracts blockchain complexity and connects real economies to programmable money.

Brazil’s Moment: A Market Ripe for Financial Infrastructure Innovation

Across Latin America, cross-border transactions still move slowly, often settling on a T+3 basis through fragmented correspondent networks, leaving businesses exposed to FX volatility and trapped liquidity. 

Over the last decade, Brazil has quietly built what Valor Capital calls the Brazil Stack (source: https://brazilstack.com/) - a set of public rails so effective that private fintechs now build on top of it.

Pix, the Central Bank’s instant-payment system, processes 77 billion transactions a year for 158 million people, surpassing card volumes in just four years. Cash at the point of sale is down to 31 percent. Open Finance, Gov.br, and soon Drex, the Central Bank’s digital real, complete the stack and enable programmable, compliant, always-on finance.

Regulatory clarity around stablecoins and the maturation of Pix as a real-time settlement layer have created the conditions for local builders to operationalize global liquidity. Brazil’s financial infrastructure is now advanced enough that crypto-native tools can plug in at the institutional level rather than around it.

The results are hard to ignore: between July 2024 and June 2025, Brazil processed $318 billion in crypto assets, up 110 percent year-on-year. Stablecoins account for 90% of all flows. 

This is the backdrop for Lumx, a company extending the Brazil Stack outward to global finance.

Lumx: Bridging Stablecoins and the Brazil Stack

Founded in 2023, Caio Barbosa and Gabriel Polverelli started out building wallet infrastructure for tokenized assets - the kind of quiet, technical plumbing work no one notices until it becomes indispensable. Then they pivoted. Payments were the bigger problem, and they decided to fix it from the ground up. 

A Rio native, Caio Barbosa grew up seeing how Brazil’s financial and legal systems often worked for institutions, not individuals. That frustration became his motivation. Trained in law but drawn to design, he started building digital tools that made complex systems usable. His collaboration with BTG Pactual, Latin America’s largest investment bank, turned into a deep partnership with BTG leading Lumx’s pre-seed round.

Gabriel Polverelli, an MIT Under 35 honoree, is a self-taught programmer who founded his first startup at seventeen and, by twenty-three, launched Sem Processo, one of Brazil’s leading legal-tech platforms. The company built automation tools to navigate Brazil’s endless backlog of court paperwork, a problem that was less about law and more about latency. The goal then was to make the country’s slowest processes move faster. Now he is applying the same logic to money.

Through direct integration with licensed partners, Lumx can execute BRL→USDC minting natively. This provides clients access to deep liquidity, competitive exchange rates, and institutional-grade uptime, advantages that are nearly impossible to replicate without Tier 1 banking access. For any global PSP or fintech serving Latin American flows, Lumx offers what was previously unavailable: a direct, regulated, and cost-efficient gateway into Brazil’s payments ecosystem. Its integration with Pix, Brazil’s real-time payment network, enables instant BRL settlement. Through simplified payments orchestration and on- and off-ramping, Lumx enables international partners to plug directly into one of the world’s most active financial markets through a single API.

Why We Believe Lumx Represents the Next Chapter of LatAm Payments

At CMT Digital, we back teams building the foundational infrastructure of the emerging financial system. This maturation is transforming stablecoins from a financial experiment into real financial infrastructure - and Lumx makes that infrastructure usable. 

• For enterprises: treasury teams can convert BRL into stablecoins and pay international vendors within minutes, not days.
   
• For platforms: marketplaces can onboard users across countries without maintaining local banking relationships.
   
• For developers: recurring payments, invoices, and payouts can be built directly on top of Lumx’s orchestration layer.

Brazil is showing what is possible when regulation, infrastructure, and innovation align. Lumx stands at the intersection where stablecoin liquidity meets local rails, making global payments feel as seamless as sending a text.

As stablecoin rails become the new settlement standard, Lumx exemplifies the kind of interoperable infrastructure that will define the next chapter of global finance.

Lumx provides global PSPs, fintechs, and treasury teams with a direct, regulated pathway to integrate stablecoin settlement and BRL liquidity across Latin America. Reach out to their team at [email protected] to learn more.

For informational purposes only, nothing herein should be construed as investment advice nor an offering to buy or sell any security or investment. Views expressed by any individuals are solely those of the individual author or speaker and do not necessarily reflect the views of CMT Digital. Views and opinions are as of the date provided and subject to change without notice.

CMT Digital, its partners and affiliates may have investments in companies referenced. Any investments or portfolio companies discussed are not representative of all investments of CMT Digital and there can be no assurance that the investments will be profitable or that other investments made in the future will have similar results. A list of portfolio companies may be found at: cmt.digital/portfolio. The list of portfolio companies is updated periodically and may not reflect the most recent CMT Digital investments.