Ronald Tato Podcast Transcript
Ronald Tato joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, Home of The Digital Executive podcast.
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Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Ronald Tato. Ronald Tato leads partnerships at Tria, a self-custodial neo-finance app powering crypto trading, yield generation, and real-world spending for more than five hundred thousand users across 150-plus countries.
With more than half a decade of experience scaling Web3 ecosystems, Ronald has built a career at the intersection of consumer crypto, institutional infrastructure, and ecosystem growth. Before joining Tria, he worked in on-chain analytics at Centaura, where he developed deep expertise in blockchain intelligence, market behavior, and decentralized finance trends.
At Tria, Ronald focuses on building strategic partnerships that help bring crypto closer to mainstream adoption. He is helping translate complex on-chain technologies, including perpetual futures, cross-chain swaps, and Visa-powered crypto cards into seamless, intuitive financial products designed for everyday users.
His work bridges the gap between builders, protocols, exchanges, and consumers, giving him a uniquely informed perspective on how digital assets are evolving from speculative instruments into practical financial tools with real-world utility.
Well, good afternoon, Ron. Welcome to the show.
Ronald Tato: Hi, Brian. Thank you very much.
Thank you for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. You’re hailing out of Madrid, Spain. I’m in Kansas City, so we’re probably, um, thinking about seven hours, maybe six hours apart, and I just appreciate you jumping through these time zones and different calendars to get here, so thank you. And Ron, if we could, let’s just jump right into your first question.
You’ve built your career at the intersection of consumer crypto, institutional infrastructure, and ecosystem growth from on-chain analytics at Centaura, and now leading partnerships at Tria. Take us back to the beginning. What drew you into Web3 in the first place, and what were the key moments that shaped the path from blockchain intelligence work to scaling consumer-facing crypto products?
Ronald Tato: Honestly, Brian, what drew me into Web3 was in that technology itself. It was pretty much watching money break for the people I grew up around. Um, so my background in Argentina helped me, uh, watch all of these things going on. So, I grew up with capital controls, parallel exchange rates, and a national, uh, memory of the corralito, which I’ll, I’ll explain into that later.
So, when the government literally froze people’s bank accounts all of the sudden, so you don’t fully understand how abnormal that level of friction with money is until you leave. And then you see it everywhere across Latin America, people sending remittances home and losing, um, eight, ten percent o-on the rail, workers without bank account at all, billions of them globally.
Engineers from a generation getting paid by US, uh, US companies and European companies through Payoneer or PayPal, taking another card just to receive a salary on their own currency. That was the surface. The drastic decision to go full-time into crypto came when I went one level deeper, when I actually understood, uh, how banking rails work and under the hood.
So cross-border payments isn’t slow and expe– and expensive because it has to be. It’s slow and expensive because the rails were designed in a different century by institution whose business model depends on the friction. Swift, corresponding banks, settlement windows, intermediaries taking a clip at every step.
You start mapping it out, and you realize the whole system is held together by tape and incentives. And then you look at what blockchain actually does for gap and bold money, near instant settlement. Doesn’t care about borders or office hours, and the gap is so wide, it’s almost insulting. That was the moment.
Once I saw both sides of the broken rails and the working alternative, there was no going back. My career since then has been across crypto, AI, on-chain analytics. I’ve sp– I spent time on the institutional side of companies like Zentura, also on the AI and data side, but the thread connecting all of it has been the same.
Understanding how systems or money and intelligence actually work end to end. Because if you only s-see the consumer layer, you end up building pretty apps on top of broken plumbing. I actually met the Tria founder years before I joined. Uh, we, we stayed in touch, but the timing wasn’t right back then. Uh, what pulled me in eventually was the thesis of a self-custodial neo-finance app, not a wallet, not an exchange, that could give a regular person, especially in Latin America, Southeast Asia, the unbanked markets, the same financial instru– uh, infrastructure that institutions already have.
One account, the user owns it, froze boarded by default, and it doesn’t feel like crypto. So that’s the path. Argentina taught me, uh, money is broken for most of the world. Going deep in the rails taught me why. And Tria became the answer to the question, can you actually fix it for the consumer side? Not in theory, but in their pocket.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Really appreciate that. You know, I know that’s been a frustration for a lot of people, even in the US. Um, but I just really love the backstory, how you got into DeFi and, and blockchain, and it truly resonated with you. You saw how banks controlled people’s money, how they could freeze money, uh, how these fiat institutions were taking a percentage.
Um, and it is, it’s like highway robbery. I mean, PayPal and others, um, take, you know, six percent just off the top, and it’s just… I think it’s highway robbery in my opinion, but that’s just again my opinion. Uh, so power to the people. And I like your background also. Uh, we talk a lot about tech here, obviously.
AI analytics and blockchain is kind of your sweet spot, so I appreciate that. And Ron, Tria positioned– is positioned as a self-custodial neo-finance app serving over five hundred thousand users across a hundred and fifty-plus countries. Recently, twelve million dollar funded with on-chain perps, cross-chain swaps, a Visa card, and yield all inside one balance.
For listeners here who hear neobank and think Revolut or Monzo, what does self-custodial actually change about the product experience and the user’s relationship with their money?
Ronald Tato: Yeah. The word neobank is doing a lot of work in our category, to be honest. When people hear it, uh, they think about Revolut, Monzo, and Twenty Six.
There’s, there’s a different other– There’s so many of them. And those are good products, but they’re still banks. Your money is on their balance sheet. If Revolut goes down tomorrow, you’re standing in line with their other creditors. And we’ve seen, uh, exactly that play out in traditional finance more times than people remember.
Self-custodial flips that whole relationship. So with Tria, the user owns the keys. The wallet is theirs. We cannot freeze it. We cannot lend it out. We cannot lose it. If Tria disappears tomorrow, the user recovers their balance with their keys, full stop. So, the user is not trusting Tria with their money, Tria is just the rails.
What does that change at the product level? Three things. First, what we can offer. Because the money is on-chain, we can plug into real yield protocols, real perp DEXs, real inf– uh, stablecoin infrastructure, not synthetic versions wrapped behind a bank. The users holding USDC in their Tria account is actually holding USDC.
Second, what we cannot do. We can never rug pull a user savings. We can never quietly use deposit as a balance sheet for our own positions. The architecture itself prevents it. That’s a guarantee a regular bank cannot give you. They can be solvent, but they cannot promise they won’t try to be. The third, and this is the interesting one, how the user thinks about money changes.
With traditional neobank, the implicit relationship is, “I trust the company with my paycheck.” With Tria, the implicit relationship is, “I own this. This is my balance sheet.” That sounds philosophical, but it matters in practice. Once a user knows the money is theirs, they’re more willing to put real life through it, get paid into it, spend on the card, trade out of it, hold yield in it.
It becomes the actual primary account, not a crypto side wallet. And the UX is the same. Social login, no seed phrases, gas abstracted, cross-chain feels like one balance. We have Visa card live in a hundred and fifty-plus countries. So from the surface, it looks like a clean, modern neobank. Underneath, the relationship between the user and their money is completely different.
So that’s what, uh, self-custodial actually changes. It’s not the surface, it’s the ar-architecture of trust, which is key
Brian Thomas: Love that. Trust is the key word here, of course. Um, yeah, you talked about that, um, you know, Revolt and Monzo, and of course, you know, what people… Again, people have been burned so many times, but I like how you went into the self-custodial, and there is a guarantee with Tria.
You talked about the consumer, the user holds the keys to their wallet, and they have full control of their crypto, and the guarantee is what really makes this lucrative, and I really appreciate that. And Ron, Tria recently integrated Decibel to bring on-chain perpetual futures directly into the app and went live on Aptos as a high-speed execution layer.
Walk us through why distribution, not matching speed, but has become the bottleneck for on-chain perps and how Tria is collapsing what used to be five different apps into one self-custodial account
Ronald Tato: Great question, Brian. So here’s the thing. Most people miss about on-chain perps in twenty twenty-six.
Matching speed isn’t the bottleneck anymore. Hyperliquid, Decibel on Aptos, these venues do subsecond, um, execution, deep liquidity, real markets. The infrastructure problem is solved. The bottleneck has shifted entirely to distribution. So think about what trading on-chain perps actually looks like for a normal user today.
They need a wallet. They need a bridge to get assets to the right chain. They need an exchange interface. They probably need a centralized exchange too, just to on-ramp fiat. They want a card to spend, separate company. Yield on their idle balance, another. So a user who wants what a modern trade– trader wants, execution, fiat in, spend out, yield on idle, is juggling at least five apps.
Five sign-ups, five places where things break, five different security models. So Trias bet is to collapse all of that into one self-custodial account. One balance, one identity, everything happens inside it. So with Decibel, we brought on-chain perpetuals futures directly into the app. The user doesn’t go to Decibel.
They open Tria, and perps, uh, and perps are a tab. Same wallet, same balance, same fiat, um, uh, that came in through their virtual account. Same balance, uh, they spend from, uh, from with their card. Trade closes, proceeds are spendable on the card a moment later. That’s a different experience from logging to Tria, withdraw to a CEX, uh, or centralized exchange, trade, withdraw back, bridge, so on and so forth.
So Aptos was the right execution layer for this because of the speed and finality. Move VM to subsecond blocks, predictable fees. For trading, that’s the difference between feeling like an app and feeling like a website pretending to be an app. And the larger point, when execution is good enough across multiple venues, whoever owns the distribution wins.
We have five hundred k plus users across a hundred and fifty plus countries. We have the card li-live. We have fiat rails coming online. Virtual USDC, euro, um, virtual accounts, I mean, USDC, euro, GBP accounts, uh, coming this month. We have cross-chain routing via Best Path, which is our proprietary tech. So adding perps isn’t a new vertical for us, it is another module that plugs into the same account.
So the way I’d frame it, five years ago, the question was, can we build a DEX or a decentralized exchange that competed– competes with Binance on speed? Today, that question is solved. The new question is, who can put that DEX inside a product that users already lives in? That’s the bottleneck we’re working on, distribution, and the answer is one self-custodial account that does everything.
Not five apps coordinated by hope.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. That’s awesome. I appreciate that. And that’s been, uh, kind of a pain point for a lot of people that wanna get, uh, leverage other assets, uh, other, um, again, assets on other chain, other digital, uh, assets. Uh, users obviously need this bridge. They need, uh, an interchange.
Maybe they’re using multiple apps, as you talked about. Um, there’s hops, uh, potentially multiple security vulnerabilities in this whole process, and it’s just really frustrating and, and we’ve seen that, uh, in, in action. But I like how Triia leverages Decibel to bring in all those assets directly into one platform, making it seamless.
Uh, again, less security, I’d say, attack service from my perspective here. So thank you. Ron, last question of the day. If we– as we look ahead to the future, as digital assets evolve from speculative instruments into practical financial tools, and as humans and AI agents both start transacting on chain at scale, how do you see the future of consumer banking unfolding, and what role does Triia play in shaping that world rather than just participating in it?
Ronald Tato: Mm-hmm. Great question, Brian. So the five-to-10-year view is where this gets really interesting because there are two big shifts happening in parallel, and they are going to converge. So the first shift, in my opinion, digital assets stop being, uh, thought of a speculative, uh, instrument and becoming how money moves by default.
Stable coins are already there for cross-border tokenized real world assets, on-chain payroll, programmable money. These are not future things. They’re rolling out right now. So in 10 years, is this on-chain stops being a question anyone’s asked. It’s just where money lives. And the second shift, and this is the one fewer people are pricing in, AI agents start transac-transacting on-chain at scale.
Agents don’t have a bank account, they have wallets. They don’t have credit cards, they have proga-programmable spending rules. In a world where my agent is booking my travel, paying my contractors, hedging my exposure, that agent needs an account, and that account is going to look a lot more like a self-custodial crypto wallet than a Chase checking account, for instance.
So, when those two shifts converge, money is on-chain by default and real share of transactions are initiated by software, not humans. Consumer banking, as we know it, dissolves. The question is no longer which bank do I use? It becomes which account do I, do I and my agents operate through? And that account has to be self-custodial because you cannot have an autonomous agent operating off someone’s sales balance sheet.
That’s not a financial product. That’s a legal trap. So Trio’s role in shaping that is not just participating. Come from three things we’re building towards right now. One of them is self-custody as the default architecture. We took that bet early, early primitive. We add, um, herbs, virtual accounts, lending, eventually credit.
S-since on top on, on an account that the user or the user’s agents actually controls. Then second, the unbundling rebundle. So today, consumers’ banking is bundled around the bank’s product line, taking accounts, savings, card, loan. We’re rebundling it around the user. One balance, one identity, every financial action available from it.
Humans first, agents next. And third, real world integration. So the Visa card via Rails partnership with payment networks, we’re not building a crypto silo. We’re building the connective tissue between on-chain money and the rest of someone’s life. The future isn’t crypto replacing TradFi, it’s the two becoming indistinguishable, and the user not caring which is which.
So, in five years, the goal is, uh, is a user who has stopped thinking about banking. They have an account, it does everything. Um, it’s theirs, of course, and, and their agent has the access to, uh, every single corner of it. And Tria is the rails underneath all of it. Not the bank, not the brand they, they obsess over, just a layer that makes the whole thing to work.
That’s what I want to build moving forward on, on Tria.
Brian Thomas: That’s really cool. I like that. And of course, Tria will be that layer that helps connect the world. Uh, you did talk about that, uh, in the future, you know, assets will be available on-chain by default. Uh, AI agents will have wallets or accounts with programmable rules, obviously.
Uh, and really, it, it takes that headache and that overhead out of the, the equation and allows you to really seamlessly d- do your life transactions, uh, with, with this being a second thought, and I really like that. Mm. And I know Tria is gonna be at the center of it, so thank you. And Ron, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Ronald Tato: Likewise, Brian. Thank you very much for having me. It was a great session.
Brian-Thomas: Bye for now.
Ronald Tato Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
