He Scaled Trust Wallet to 15M Users. Now He's Killing SWIFT — Leone Parise, CTO of Trace Finance

<p>In episode 93 of Colors of Tech &amp; Entrepreneurship, Lam sits down with Leone Parise, co-founder and CTO of Trace Finance: the Brazil-and-US-based cross-border payments infrastructure company that has moved over $10 billion for institutional clients including some of the largest global payment companies operating in Latin America. Before Trace, Leone was one of the first engineers at Trust Wallet, joining when the team was three or four people and the wallet had roughly 50,000 users. He left two and a half years later with more than 15 million.</p><p><br></p><p>Leone doesn&#39;t hedge. He explains why building wallets and blockchains are terrible business models, how Trust Wallet actually made money, and why he thinks the overwhelming majority of blockchains launched in the last few years add no real value. He walks through the mechanics of moving money out of Brazil — the compliance documents, the week-long FX exposure banks force on you, and the exit tax that jumped roughly tenfold overnight — and explains why treasury management, not transaction fees, is the actual secret sauce of every fintech you admire.</p><p><br></p><p>The second half turns into one of the most candid AI conversations we&#39;ve had on the show. Leone lays out why he sees quantum computing as mostly hype, why AI&#39;s real breakthrough is collapsing non-polynomial problems into fixed time, and why he&#39;s deliberately gone back to writing his own code and emails after noticing his own skills eroding. He argues the layoff-because-of-AI narrative is mostly investor theater, that &quot;not your keys, not your coins&quot; becomes &quot;not your weights, not your AI,&quot; and that the real singularity happened 500 years ago with the printing press. He closes with an argument that there has never been a better time to build.</p><p><br></p><p>⌛ Timestamps:<br>00:00:00 Episode trailer<br>00:00:35 Show &amp; guest introduction<br>00:07:00 Inside early Binance and scaling Trust Wallet to 15M users<br>00:17:15 How a crypto wallet actually makes money<br>00:25:28 Quantum computing: hype or real threat?<br>00:37:00 How Trace Finance started at a Binance event in Berlin<br>00:41:00 Instant FX, faster compliance, and why the API is the product<br>00:48:05 What is Pix? Brazil&#39;s instant payment system explained<br>00:52:55 Competitors, frenemies, and the real rival<br>00:59:53 Challenges facing Trace Finance: Regulation, security, and insuring blockchain operations<br>01:04:53 The busines