What made you create Vinteum?

Vinteum came out of a very concrete gap I kept seeing. Brazil has a lot of smart, motivated people who are curious about Bitcoin, but very few clear paths to go from interested to long-term open-source contributor. Much of Bitcoin development still happens far from here, both geographically and culturally.

Honestly, it also started from a very personal place. I wanted to have Bitcoin developers around me. I was learning, building, and organizing in Brazil, but most of the people doing deep protocol and infrastructure work were always somewhere else.

Over time, that personal desire turned into a broader realization about the ecosystem. If Bitcoin development stays too geographically and culturally concentrated, it becomes fragile. You miss perspectives that matter for real-world use, and you also increase the risk that political, regulatory, or social pressure in a single region can interfere with developers doing their work.

Decentralizing development is not just about adding more people. It is about creating real paths for contributors in different contexts to build deep expertise, influence priorities, and stay involved long term. Vinteum is my attempt to help create those conditions from Brazil, while staying fully connected to the global Bitcoin development process.

Do you think Brazil’s got big potential for using Bitcoin for daily payments? And do you think Pix kinda helps Bitcoin by showing people how to handle digital money?

I actually think systems like Pix make it harder for Bitcoin to find its place as a day-to-day payment tool, at least in countries like Brazil. If you look only at cost, speed, reliability, and general UX, Pix is extremely hard to beat. It’s instant, free or close to free, deeply integrated into banking apps, and works the same way everywhere. If you ignore the deeper philosophical and adversarial differences, Pix simply feels smoother and more obvious for most users.

Bitcoin as a payment system is much easier to appreciate in places where the existing alternatives are clearly broken. In countries where people still rely on checks by mail, multi-day bank transfers, limited banking hours, or expensive card networks, the value proposition of instant, global, internet-native money is immediately visible. In that sense, Bitcoin’s strengths stand out more clearly when compared against outdated or exclusionary systems.

The tradeoff, of course, is that Pix is centrally controlled, fully surveilled, and tightly coupled to the banking system and the state. It can be censored, frozen, reversed, or changed unilaterally. Those are real and important differences, but they are not part of most people’s lived experience on a daily basis, so they don’t drive behavior at scale. Convenience usually wins until something breaks.

Because of that, Bitcoin tends to gain more traction as a payment tool in places where the status quo is actively hostile or unreliable, such as under authoritarian regimes, in high-inflation economies, or where access to banking is limited or fragile. In those contexts, Bitcoin isn’t competing on marginal UX improvements, but on survival, access, and sovereignty.

Pix can still play an indirect role. It has trained people to be comfortable with QR codes, instant settlement, and self-initiated digital payments, which lowers the cognitive barrier. It also makes hybrid solutions possible, like Lightning payments that reuse Pix QR code infrastructure, as we’ve seen with things like PlebQR in Thailand. That said, these integrations tend to appeal more to Bitcoin-native users than to the general public, and are unlikely on their own to drive mass adoption.

In short, Pix raises the bar for Bitcoin on pure UX in Brazil, while Bitcoin’s advantages show up most clearly when the comparison is not convenience versus convenience, but freedom versus control.