Brazil has 81 million delinquent adults, half the adult population, with roughly $100 billion in defaulted debt.
Banks legally deduct from their accounts automatically, before they decide what to pay.
Five of the country's ten most profitable companies are banks. Itaú alone made R$46.8 billion in profit in 2025, the highest in the history of Brazilian banking, equivalent to R$128 million per day.
Brazilians don't control their own income.
How crazy is that?
@stardotfun@donfullermo sup guys, trying to get some funds for some projects:
1. Audio in livestreams are not working
2. Can't fund USDc (I think you are asking for SOL in the wallet for the transaction to come through)
Please make investor's life easier
Selfcustody is the key for a more balanced relationship between users and banks / institutions.
Neobanks are key for users having their assets and taking control of their income.
Using pre-paid credit card / debit cards, self custody, no institution taking a cut from your income without you consenting.
This is where it starts.
We are living a debt epidemic, and it has become so common that most people no longer recognize it as one.
Four out of every five Brazilian families are in debt right now. Half of them have no way to pay it back. The same pattern, in different forms, is repeating across most of the world.
- In Brazil, 80.2 percent of families carry debt, the highest level in 16 years of tracking.
- 85 percent of that debt sits in credit cards, where revolving interest routinely crosses 400 percent a year.
- Among families earning up to three minimum wages, 38.9 percent are already behind on bills, and nearly one in five says they have no ability to pay them next month.
- Globally, total debt sits above 235 percent of world GDP.
This is the steady state.
The bear market and the migration of attention toward AI have pulled the conversation in crypto away from the things that originally made it matter. That is a natural cycle. But it is worth using this moment to remember why these tools were built. The use case that justifies their existence is not somewhere in the future. It is in the inbox of every family staring at a bill they cannot pay.
The most common explanation for the debt epidemic is that people lack financial education. This is wrong. The United States runs the largest financial education infrastructure on the planet. Personal finance is taught in public schools. Television networks, podcasts, and bestselling books are dedicated to teaching ordinary people how to manage money. And yet US household debt reached 21.2 trillion in Q1 2026, with credit card balances at a record 1.277 trillion, and 37 percent of Americans cannot cover a 400 dollar emergency without borrowing. If education were the missing variable, the country that produces the most of it would have the lowest debt. It has the opposite.
The problem is not informational. It is structural. People know they should not be in debt. People know they should save. The issue is that the system makes acting on that knowledge nearly impossible, because the money never sits long enough in the household's hands for any plan to take effect. Telling someone to budget when their salary is already partially deducted before it arrives is not education. It is theater.
The mechanism is simple. In the current setup, the creditor decides the order of payment. When a family owes money on a credit card, an overdraft, a personal loan, a buy now pay later plan, and an installment for an appliance, the bank decides what gets collected and when. The salary lands in an account held by the same institution that holds the debts, and the institution applies its own priorities to that money before the worker sees it. The family spends the rest of the month reacting to whatever pressure arrives next.
This is the structural fact that matters. The order of payment is decided by whoever holds the money, and in the current system that is almost never the household itself.
Every serious framework for getting out of debt rests on the same idea. You list what you owe, you decide the order, you attack one debt at a time until it is gone, then you move to the next. The math of which debt to pay first matters less than the act of choosing. The frameworks work because they put the household back in control of the sequence. But they only work if that control actually exists. In a system where the bank holds your salary, your debts, and the right to deduct payments before you see the money, you do not have the freedom to sequence anything. The bank already sequenced it for you. Without the ability to hold your own income, every debt elimination framework becomes motivational content. With it, the same framework becomes executable strategy.
We need better tools tho.
Self custody is the technical capability to hold your own money outside an institution that has competing claims on it. If your income lands in a wallet you control, in a stablecoin you choose, you decide which debt to pay this month, in what amount, and in what order. The bank stops being the operating system of your finances and becomes one counterparty among several.
This is not an ideological position. It is the structural position that wealthy households already occupy through lawyers, accountants, and separate accounts that let them direct their own cash flow. Self custody gives the same position, in a much simpler form, to people who never had access to those tools.
The second piece is how the money gets spent. Credit cards are the most expensive form of household borrowing on the planet, and they are the default way most people transact. Non custodial alternatives are the opposite. You can only spend what you actually have. There is no revolving balance compounding while you sleep. Paying becomes a deduction from your own assets, not the creation of a new liability.
The technology to deliver this already exists, they have the rails, the wallets, and the user interfaces to put self custody in the hands of ordinary people. What is still missing is the framing. Most of these products are positioned as crypto tools for crypto users. The real opportunity is to position them as what they actually are, which is a way out of the debt epidemic for households that have no other way out. That shift in purpose is not a technical problem. It is a question of who these products decide they are building for, and what proposition they put at the center of their work.
Together, these pieces give a household something the current system does not. A place to hold income that no creditor can touch first. A way to spend that cannot turn into debt. And the freedom to decide the order in which obligations get paid. That is the entire structural difference, and it is enough to change what is possible.
The population using these tools today is small relative to the population that would benefit. That is the natural state of any new technology. The work that comes next is making the same capability available to people who do not have the time or technical background to learn the underlying machinery. The onboarding has to be shorter than opening a bank account. The interface has to assume the user does not want to learn what a private key is. The product has to work for somebody three months behind on a bill, earning a minimum wage, who has never opened a wallet.
The debt epidemic is not going to be solved by the same institutions that produced it, and it is not going to be solved by teaching people lessons they have already heard a thousand times. The solution is a shift in who holds the income and who decides where it goes, delivered through tools simple enough that the shift can actually happen.