El Dorado Raised $9M From Paradigm and Built a Neobank on Tempo

This is, this is Zach here with from StableDash. We're with Guillermo from Eldorado. We're kicking off our NEO segment powered by Dakota. This is covering everything NEO finance and the future of banking. StableDash live is sponsored by Agora, built for global institutions moving money at the speed of the Internet. You can learn more at agora.finance. And it's perfect timing because at the stablecoin conference today powered by Bidso, you had some exciting news.

So, Guillermo, maybe tell tell the people what what happened today, and we'll kinda dive into more of the nitty gritty because you I like how you paired fundraise announcement, spoiler alert, with,

product announcement as well. So, yeah, give tell us what happened. Well, Zach, thank you so much for the invite. I'm a big fan of the show for for quite some time and super excited to be here. So we just announced a series a round led by Paradigm and and with, Coinbase Ventures participating. It's a $9,000,000 round, and we tied the round announcement with the launch of Eldorado Business, which is a multisig neobank

built on Tempo. So we're gonna be talking a little bit more about that. So as much as I wanna just dive straight straight into Tempo, you mentioned out here before we hopped on that the focus has been so much around consumer apps, consumer apps. You know, I'm seeing more and more apps, some are launching business banking solutions, but I guess walk us through kind of the evolution of where Eldorado started, where you got your foothold on the consumer side, and why now?

Why why is the time now to go to the business side?

Excellent. So go going back to the early days, I'm originally from Venezuela. I started mining Bitcoins back from home in 2013. Actually, my first Bitcoin miner was the Antminer

s one. I don't know if you remember that one. Was that a struggle to get in Venezuela? Or or was that a was that a story in and of itself? It was certainly not easy.

So we, figured out that Venezuela was actually a pretty good country to do Bitcoin mining since electricity was nearly free at the time. So we started importing miners directly from, from Bitmain, and we got super excited, went on to raise some a few, angel checks, and and eventually built one of the biggest, Bitcoin mining businesses in the country, which I, successfully sold in 2017. So that was kind of my first experience into the,

Bitcoin world. It was Bitcoin. Well, even like that that founder journey of, like, hey. I can catch it on to something. Wanna build it up and, you know, to exit. So congrats there. Absolutely.

But I was I was always fascinated with, exchanges. I was an an early user of local bitcoins.com. At some point, it became quite in Venezuela, in Colombia, Argentina, and some other LatAm countries. And and then with the rise of stablecoins, it it really made so much sense for us to build, like, a a stable coin first application and built upon the the building blocks that we learned from local Bitcoins and Binance peer to peer.

So we built the very first, tropicalized, peer to peer marketplace with USDT as the main asset. So we act we were actually one of the first startups in in LatAm that launched USDT on Tron. Wow. The the at the time, that was what more most people were demanding, and we launched the app in late two thousand twenty one, early two thousand El Dorado. This is El Dorado. The OG. Yeah. This is the El Dorado app.

And and, eventually, the the ambition got bigger and bigger, and we started adding more financial products and services. And long story short, today, we have a Visa debit card. We have QR payments across across five LatAm countries. We have virtual dollar accounts. We have investments, and we also,

provide across border payments across 12 LatAm countries. And if I saw you're you're actually focused on some geos that we don't cover quite frequently, like, I think it's all Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay. Is that still kind of the case when we're transitioning maybe into the business focus, or are there other geos that are sticking out right now? That's correct. So we've,

rapidly become one of the top financial apps in many of the countries that you just mentioned. Like, for for instance, in Bolivia, we're consistently ranked among the five or 10 most popular financial applications, and we're consistently ranked among some of the most important banks. So having that kind of presence is also clearing the way for us to also offer services to businesses. So our own clients were already requesting business services,

and that's kind of Yeah. You you beat me to it. I was gonna ask Yeah. Were were were your consumer, you know, clients on the app? Did you catch some of them maybe using it for business purposes? And that was kind of the early signs that, okay. I think we need to bring this this new product to market.

Absolutely. We have a bunch of people doing things like drop shipping, a bunch of importers, people who buy things from Alibaba, from all of these TEMU, all of these, like, Chinese, like like, b to b commerce platforms, and and and that was a use case that that that became pretty clear to us. And I think that the other side of the story, it is really that, we built this product to ourselves.

So, and let me let me give you more more color about how we thought about building a Dorado business, but we have raised, nearly 95% of our funds in stablecoins. Wow. So managing stablecoins, even for a crypto native startup like ourselves, it's pretty complex. So you have maybe a safe, and then you have a safe with a threshold connected with multiple lectures.

And then if we wanted to do if we wanted to pay to our lawyers in The US, we needed to reach out to an OTC desk in Miami or in Puerto Rico, and then we need we needed to send the money to the OTC and then from the OTC to the lawyers. And then if we needed to pay for Amazon, we've still So fun. We needed to, like, open, like, a different, account for for having a card. And at some point, we we said to ourselves, like, this is, like, this is insane.

Like, how is it possible that in crypto today, the only multisix solutions are SAFE, MPC Bolt, and SWATs? I love I love those teams, and I I believe they're doing great things. But there's the the the opportunity gap for building a much more, like, fintech oriented solution is

is huge, especially if you're targeting Bolivian businesses. Yeah. I was gonna say, like, you know, we we we love Stefan and the and the Altitude team, and and they've been great supporters of the brand. And we definitely don't buy into that it's a winner take all market here, especially when you're talking about, you know, these geos that look very similar.

You know, we say Latam, and we're like, well, you realize we're lumping in how many how many countries into that that one word, and everybody has their own unique, you know, unique needs. Use cases may even sound similar with importers and exporters, but, again, what they're looking for from a fintech experience may be different in Bolivia than, you know, maybe what they're looking for in Thailand or Vietnam if we're gonna go complete opposite emerging market.

One thing I'm excited about, like I said, and I think you mentioned this when you reached out to us was, hey. We're also launching on Tempo. You know, we've seen a I see Tempo on my timeline all the time, but this is probably the first time I've seen it on a more either, like, it's obviously not a consumer app, but application for businesses rather than being, you know, purely another infrastructure provider.

So I guess help us understand from a product perspective, maybe when did Tempo come under your radar, and why did you say, hey. This this is who we're launching on. This is, you know, this is our home.

Excellent. So we we've been working with the Paralym team for over a year and a half, nearly two years. So we we knew already plenty of the, Tempo faults. We know that they're, like, some of the smartest faults in the in the crypto space. And they're also pretty payments oriented. Like, the fact that Matt sits on the board of Stripe Yeah. Already opens so many so many doors in terms of, like, corporate relationships and and also know how in terms of building payment payment products.

But when we decided to build this product, we knew that, there there was a a big synergy in terms of leveraging a payments first blockchain, and then we we became, like, overly excited about the fact that they are building so many tools and and such a good stack for the next wave of agentic payments. So that that that was kind of how the decision came through.

And what what what about on the forex side? Because I think they also have some native stable point swaps built in. Did that did that affect your decision? Or is that right now, it's still so young that it's like, hey, we just need to focus on dollar access.

Yeah. Totally. For instance, a a cool feature on on Tempo is that you get to pay transaction fees on on stable coins, on a set of stablecoins, and it's a fixed fee. So, that's especially important because if you're if you're, like, offering your service to a business client, like, business clients don't understand about, like, gas fees. And Yeah. And let me tell tell you something.

Like, operating with Tron for so many years, like, customers still don't understand why does it cost $1 at some a certain point, and sometimes it costs, like, $5. You gotta when the network's congested. Yeah. Yeah. So so that that's pretty cool about about Tenpo. I think that the forex side is still pretty early, to be honest. There are probably other chains with, more developed, let's say, local stable coin liquidity. But but but we see that Tempo is definitely driving in that direction.

Can you speak to privacy at all?

And what is maybe Tempo building in this realm? Because I think we're seeing this along with, you know, Solana. We've had people say, hey. Private privacy control is coming. We've obviously seen the rise of the of Canton. What role does Tempo maybe play in in in building out these these privacy centric features?

Yeah. That's that's a pretty important piece of the Tempo roadmap. I don't know if if privacy is, already enabled, but they they've been working on it for the past few months. The team, is led by by this this guy, Georgios, who who is the CTO of of ParAIM as well. So, he he's been one of the main guys, building the the the privacy layer on on Temple. Yeah. You you mentioned,

forward thinking as far as NGENTIQ, and I imagine you're talking about their their MPP. Is that something that we should look forward to in the product? Is this something that you know that right now at the base level that you need to be preparing for? Because I think that's something we spend a lot of time trying to decipher is, you know, where are we at in this growth cycle of the AgenTek conversation? You see these numbers growing? Is it real? Is it not?

How do you think about AgenTek as maybe the intersection of, you know, business banking and AgenTek commerce?

Yeah. I I think that we are still in in the very, very early stages. And, and, honestly, our business clients are not even requesting, like, agents to to pay for for themselves. But I do think that eventually, especially, the the agentic payments driven by by corporate cards is is gonna be a big deal. Tenpo has a, like, a massive relationship with, Bridge and Oh, Rio's stuff. And and Grain. They're getting pretty heavily.

So I I've been seeing some pretty interesting use cases such as, like, giving some instructions to a card to manage, token spend for,

like, AI models. So those those are things that seem to be quite a topic, but those things are coming over the next few months or or a couple years. I guess, last question as we get ready to wrap here. You know, you mentioned importers and exporters, but I'm wondering, you know, in in this time building and getting ready to go with the business banking, have you had any any client types that have come to you and that completely shocked you? You know, like, hey.

This this kinda wasn't on our radar, but we're excited to see that these are people that are now thinking about Sablecoins and looking to us as a solution. Absolutely.

So one of my favorite examples is actually a textile business from Paraguay who actually moves, over the border to Argentina. They sell their products in Argentine pesos. They then go and buy USDT or USDC, and then they swap again to Guaramis in in Paraguay. So these are the types of businesses that you would have never expected to be using stablecoins even two or three years ago.

So the re really, I mean, we are here at a stablecoin conference, and that's why we are leading with, like, the multisig communications and so on. Right. But to our businesses in Spanish, we talk in a completely different language and and with a completely different, like, tagline or one liner. So we don't they they don't care too much about multisig. They just care about having access to, like, a truly global account that they can use for their international operations.

So then what would your go to market motion look like with this banking? Like, how do you get on other textile businesses' radars? Like, are we you know, because I think on one hand, we're in this space, and we think, you know, the Twitter marketing and an an AEO. But do you think there's a there's a place in in these local economies where it's, hey. It's going back to billboards,

I don't know, newspaper ads? Like, how do you get on a textile business' radar? Well, after this trip, I'm actually flying to Santa Cruz De La Sierra in Bolivia because we're opening one of the first, like, one of the first neobank, like Brick and mortar? Brick and mortar offices in the world. So Wow. We're pretty pretty excited about that.

People both, like, regular, individuals and and also business owners will be able to attend to our office on a Monday through Saturday basis to solve any kind of issue or to process payments to China or to simply request information about Eldorado. So we're doing different stuff than we used to do on our consumer application, but the fact that we already have a a pretty strong consumer brand with over 1,000,000 customers It's also pretty significant. We do a lot of TikTok. Some of them own businesses. Yeah. Exactly.

We we do a lot of TikTok. We're pretty big on TikTok. So yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll have to go look that up because, you know, we're thinking about those same things. And and and I love this kind of this emergence of, like, going back to back to the basics in a way when it comes to go to market sometimes. So maybe we'll have to plan a StableDash off-site off-site in Bolivia and go and go see some of these these meetings in person. You'd be surprised. I mean, you can you can buy Toyota.

Bolivia accepts USCT directly Wow. For instance.

Don't that's getting my content wheels spinning. Maybe we gotta go buy a truck down there. Awesome. Well, Guillermo, it's great to sit down with you. This is, you know, we're excited to kick off the neo banking sec segment here on SableDash live powered by Dakota. So thanks for sitting down with us today, and congrats. We'll be right back. We'll take a short break, and we'll be back with some more interviews from the Sablecoin conference on CDMX powered by Bitso. So see you next time.