Hi everyone!
Robson Silva is Co-Founder of Pods.
He joins the show to discuss how DeFi’s lack of traction with retail pushed Pods toward building modular yield infrastructure for Latin America’s neobanks.
The conversation was recorded live at the TokenNation event in São Paulo.
It lands at a moment when neobanks and traditional banks alike are racing to bolt yield products onto their stacks without retrofitting their core infrastructure.
Silva trained as a naval engineer before finding crypto in 2017, then spent a year in Singapore working on early AMM research during the ICO era.
He returned to Brazil and co-founded Pods as a DeFi options protocol, building toward almost $10 million in TVL without ever launching a token.
Along the way, Pods also ran a zero-knowledge privacy pilot for Brazil’s CBDC, tokenized construction debt with the registry notary Núclea, and tokenized Brazilian government bonds with Mercado Bitcoin.
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Key takeways from the conversation:
* Pods spent two and a half years building a DeFi options protocol before realizing retail flows weren’t coming through MetaMask.
* The team built a zero-knowledge privacy pilot for Brazil’s central bank digital currency project, working alongside competing approaches from Microsoft and EY.
* Programmable privacy for composable DeFi remains unsolved. Silva argues AMMs may need to be rebuilt from scratch rather than patched with a privacy layer on top.
* Pods pivoted to B2B, letting neobanks plug into insured, cross-chain yield vaults through an API instead of building that infrastructure themselves.
* Crypto wallet Picnic moved more than 10% of its idle-asset user base into a Pods-powered savings account within 10 days of launch.
* Pods’ cross-chain USDC-to-BRLA product is now running close to $2 million in monthly volume in Brazil.
I enjoyed this wide-ranging conversation with Rob and I hope you do as well.
You can connect with him on Linkedin
Have a great weekend, everyone
-AWS
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