Key Takeaways
- CEO Marcus Viriato said the company shifted focus from London to Brazil because regulators there were more supportive of crypto.
- Parfin developed its Enigma protocol to enable confidential blockchain transactions.
- Regulation remains the biggest obstacle for DeFi expansion.
Parfin, a blockchain infrastructure provider working with banks and broker-dealers, says Brazil’s early embrace of tokenization and crypto regulation gave the company a head start that could now pay off globally as US lawmakers move toward clearer digital asset rules.
Parfin’s Brazil Push
“We realized that there was a lack of regulatory clarity in Europe, in London, in the US to start a business,” Marcus Viriato, chief executive and co-founder of Parfin, told CCN in an interview at Consensus 2026.
“We saw a huge opportunity in Brazil, because the regulators, the central bank, the Securities Commission of Brazil, they were very pro tokenization, crypto.”
Parfin, founded six years ago and initially headquartered in London, builds blockchain infrastructure for banks, broker-dealers, and financial institutions.
The company is now preparing to expand internationally after establishing itself in Latin America, Viriato said.
“We’re ahead of the curve in terms of maturity, product maturity, product-market fit,” he said, pointing to growing regulatory momentum in the US around proposed crypto legislation such as the CLARITY Act.
The company’s trajectory reflects how some crypto infrastructure firms increasingly see emerging markets with supportive regulators as proving grounds for institutional blockchain adoption.
Especially as developed markets have struggled to establish comprehensive frameworks for digital assets.
Winning Institutional Trust
Parfin counts major Brazilian financial institutions among its clients, including exchange and banking groups, but Viriato said securing its first large customer took nearly two years.
“When you’re a small startup, you fight to get the first big client,” he said. “A massive bank will look at this small startup with like 20 people.”
Viriato, a former managing director and partner at investment bank BTG Pactual, said his industry connections helped open doors.
However, the company still had to navigate lengthy procurement and due diligence processes.
Parfin’s breakthrough came after winning a contract with the Brazilian stock exchange, which used the company’s infrastructure to distribute crypto products to broker-dealers.
“That opened up the doors for all the other institutions,” Viriato said. “The second one was easier, the third one was even easier.”
The contract followed a standard institutional procurement cycle, beginning with a request for information (RFI), then a request for quotation (RFQ), and security reviews and compliance checks.
“The process took like six months,” he said. “But finally we got the deal.”
Institutional adoption of blockchain technology has accelerated globally as banks explore tokenized deposits and stablecoins.
The Demand For Confidential Blockchain Transactions
Parfin has spent more than three years developing a privacy-focused protocol called Enigma.
It is designed to support confidential blockchain transactions for financial institutions and central bank digital currency (CBDC) systems.
The project gained momentum after Brazil’s central bank launched a pilot for its CBDC initiative, known as Drex.
“We said, okay, let’s build something to address their challenge, which would guarantee privacy on a transaction in a blockchain, as well as privacy on the balances that are held in the wallet addresses,” Viriato said.
The technology aims to conceal both transaction details and wallet balances from public view while still allowing authorized oversight.
“No one wants people to know how much you have in your account or in your wallet address,” he said.
Viriato argued that implementing such systems requires specialist cryptographic expertise that most banks lack internally.
“It requires cryptographers. It requires technologies with expertise in Solidity and programming languages,” he said.
“The banks still don’t have the capacity.”
Parfin’s research team includes cryptographers with backgrounds in privacy technologies, such as Zerocash, a precursor to privacy-focused blockchain protocols.
Privacy has become a growing area of focus across the crypto industry.
Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin recently outlined a privacy roadmap for the network that includes mechanisms for selective auditing and regulatory access.
“If a regulator wants to say, ‘hey, I want to see this transaction for money laundering purposes,’ you need to implement that,” Viriato said.
Surveillance Concerns
While privacy advocates have long warned about government surveillance in digital finance systems, Viriato argued that much of the crypto ecosystem is already heavily monitored.
“My stablecoin today, it’s fully monitored,” he said, referring to major issuers such as Circle and Tether.
“If there’s hacking, they can freeze the assets.”
He noted that blockchain analytics and exchange compliance requirements already make it difficult for hackers to cash out stolen crypto assets anonymously.
“The majority of hackers who hacked it went to jail because they somehow moved the coins to an exchange where they got identified,” he said.
Still, regulators globally are tightening requirements around wallet identification and anti-money laundering rules, particularly under the so-called “travel rule.”
Building Out Rayls
Parfin said it is already processing around $700 million per month in stablecoin flows through its existing infrastructure and now plans to migrate that activity onto Rayls, its newly launched blockchain ecosystem designed for institutional finance.
“We were already processing around $700 million a month of stablecoin flows,” Viriato said. “The goal is to bring this to Rayls.”
The company launched the Rayls mainnet on April 30 and is positioning the network as infrastructure that connects private institutional blockchain systems with public decentralized finance markets.
Rayls combines permissioned financial networks with public blockchain access through a multi-layer architecture that includes private networks and a public chain designed for tokenized financial assets.
The platform aims to address one of the biggest barriers to traditional financial institutions adopting DeFi infrastructure at scale: balancing privacy, compliance, and regulatory requirements with access to blockchain liquidity.
Parfin said the network has already been deployed across more than 25 financial institutions globally and is live in production with Núclea, one of the Southern Hemisphere’s largest financial market infrastructure providers.
The company also plans to expand the platform to include tokenized yield-bearing products backed by real-world assets, such as credit card receivables, trade finance, and commercial receivables.
“We have a strategy to create yield-bearing vaults,” Viriato said. “We tokenize credit card receivables, commercial receivables, trade finance receivables.”
The goal, he added, is to bring “real-world assets yield to be distributed on-chain.”
The tokenization of real-world assets has become one of the fastest-growing areas in crypto, as banks and fintech firms explore blockchain-based versions of traditional financial products.
But Viriato warned that regulation remains a major obstacle to broader institutional adoption, particularly around decentralized finance protocols and smart contracts.
“The pieces that are missing is how to regulate a smart contract, a DeFi protocol,” he said. “It’s a big gap in the market.”
He said unresolved liability questions around decentralized lending pools and hacked protocols continue to create uncertainty for institutions moving regulated assets on-chain.
“If this lending pool gets hacked, who is accountable?” Viriato said.
Industry Awaits US CLARITY
Viriato said the crypto industry is closely watching developments in Washington, where lawmakers are debating frameworks governing stablecoins and digital asset infrastructure.
“Everyone is expecting the CLARITY Act to come,” he said. “I think that will unlock huge potential and opportunity in the market.”
He added that recent discussions between banks and crypto firms around yield-bearing stablecoins could help reduce tensions.
“I think it’s going to be good for the industry in general terms,” he said.
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Kurt Robson is a London-based reporter at CCN, specialising in the fast-moving worlds of crypto and emerging technology. He began his career covering local news in Cornwall after graduating from Falmouth University with First Class Honours in Journalism. There, he cut his teeth on everything from council meetings to missing swans.
He quickly rose through the ranks to become a frontline journalist at several of the UK’s leading national newspapers. Over the years, he has interviewed musicians and celebrities, reported from courtrooms and crime scenes, and secured multiple front-page exclusives.
Following the upheaval of the COVID-19 pandemic, Kurt shifted his focus to technology journalism—just ahead of the AI boom. With a natural curiosity and a trained eye for emerging trends, he has found a new rhythm in reporting on innovation.
At CCN, Kurt's work focuses on the cutting edge of crypto, blockchain, AI, and the evolving digital world. Drawing on his background in people-first reporting and his deep interest in disruptive tech, Kurt delivers stories that are insightful, entertaining, and human-centric.
Max Moeller is a Chicago‑based writer and video editor passionate about games, tech, and crypto. Whether it’s crafting clear, insightful articles or piecing together engaging video retrospectives, he’s driven by curiosity and takes pride in keeping things human. Since 2017, Max has been published in a variety of notable crypto magazines.
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