Ronald Tato on The Future of Self-Custodial Banking | Ep 1257

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Digital Executive

Episode: Ronald Tato on The Future of Self-Custodial Banking | Ep 1257

Date: May 28, 2026
Host: Brian, Coruzant Technologies
Guest: Ronald Tato, Head of Partnerships at Tria

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Overview

This episode explores the future of self-custodial banking with Ronald Tato of Tria—a fast-growing app at the intersection of crypto, consumer finance, and blockchain tech. Ronald details his personal journey into Web3, clarifies the core value of self-custodial models, and lays out a vision for how digital assets and AI-powered agents will reshape banking as we know it. The discussion is framed by Tria's mission: to collapse legacy financial friction, empower everyday users worldwide, and position itself as connective financial tissue in the coming era of programmable money.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Ronald's Path from Argentina to Web3 Banking

[03:19 – 06:24]

• Personal Background: Ronald grew up in Argentina, where he witnessed first-hand the dysfunction of traditional banking—capital controls, parallel exchange rates, and even government freezes of personal accounts.
• Motivation:
  • “My background in Argentina helped me watch all of these things going on. So I grew up with capital controls, parallel exchange rates and a national memory of the corporate ... You don’t fully understand how abnormal that level of friction with money is until you leave.” (Ronald, 03:23)
• Realization that cross-border payment systems are slow and expensive not due to technical limitation, but “because the rails were designed in a different century by institutions whose business model depends on the friction.” (Ronald, 04:08)
• Discovery of blockchain as a functioning, borderless alternative to legacy banking rails.
• Key lesson: Going deep on the infrastructure (“the rails”) is essential—otherwise one risks "building pretty apps on top of broken plumbing.” (Ronald, 05:29)

2. What “Self-Custodial” Means for Users

[07:36 – 10:02]

• Misconceptions: Many equate “neobank” with modern fintechs like Revolut or Monzo, but those remain custodial—user funds are legally the bank's liability.
• Core Difference:
  • “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.” (Ronald, 07:59)
• Three Big Changes:
  1. Expanded Offering: Can plug into real, on-chain yield and trading protocols; user’s USDC is real USDC, not an IOU.
  2. Enforced Constraints: Tria cannot touch user funds—unlike banks, which can (and do) use deposits for their own positions.
  3. Shifted Mindset: Users implicitly control their own “balance sheet,” fostering trust and empowering them to use Tria as a primary financial account.
• UX Focus: Social login, no seed phrases, gas fees abstracted—feels like a familiar fintech product but with fundamentally different trust architecture.

3. The New Bottleneck: Distribution, Not Infrastructure

[10:50 – 13:37]

• 2026 Context: Technical hurdles (speed, liquidity) for on-chain trading are largely solved. The new difficulty is user distribution and product unification.
• Real User Experience:
  • “A user who wants what a modern trade Twitter wants—execution, fiat in, spend out, yield on idle—is juggling at least five apps, five signups, five places where things break, five different security models.” (Ronald, 11:23)
• Tria’s Bet:
  • One self-custodial account merges wallet, fiat onramp, yield, DeFi trading (including perps/futures), and card spending inside a single app.
  • “With Decibel, we brought on-chain perpetuals futures directly into the app ... Same wallet, same balance, same fiat ... trade closes, proceeds are spendable on the card a moment later.” (Ronald, 12:15)
• Tech Stack: Built on Aptos for speed and finality, with branded solutions like Best Path for seamless cross-chain routing.
• Vision: Not just matching Binance on speed, but putting world-class DeFi inside a product users already trust and use daily.

4. The Next 5–10 Years: Banking Reimagined

[14:41 – 17:43]

• Two Major Shifts:
  1. Digital Assets as Default Money:
     • Stablecoins for cross-border exchange are already here; soon, “on chain” becomes simply where money lives.
  2. AI/Agent Banking:
     • “Agents don’t have a bank account, they have wallets, they don’t have credit cards, they have programmable spending rules.” (Ronald, 15:31)
     • As AI/automation proliferate, both people and their digital agents will need self-custodial, programmable accounts.
• What This Means:
  • “Consumer banking as we know it dissolves. The question is no longer which bank do I use, it becomes which account do I and my agents operate through?” (Ronald, 16:00)
• Tria’s Role:
  • 1. Self-Custody by Default: Early bet on letting users (and their agents) truly own their accounts.
  • 2. Rebundle Around User: Instead of banks deciding product lines, users control a single, extensible account—“one balance, one identity, every financial action available from it.” (Ronald, 16:33)
  • 3. Real-World Integration: Visa, partnerships, global fiat rails—“not building a crypto silo ... but the connective tissue between on chain money and the rest of someone’s life.” (Ronald, 16:57)
• Ultimate Goal: Users will “stop thinking about banking”—they will just have accounts they control, with programmable access for both humans and agents, and “Tria is the rails underneath all of it.” (Ronald, 17:31)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On growing up with broken banking: “The government literally froze people’s bank accounts, all of a sudden ... Money is broken for most of the world. Going deep in the rails taught me why.” (Ronald, 03:52; 06:11)
• On self-custody’s real impact: “The architecture itself prevents [Tria] from using user savings. That’s a guarantee a regular bank cannot give you.” (Ronald, 08:41)
• On modern DeFi user experience: “Five apps coordinated by hope.” (Ronald, 13:17)
• On self-custodial architecture’s inevitability: “You cannot have an autonomous agent operating off someone else’s balance sheet. That’s not a financial product, that’s a legal trap.” (Ronald, 16:15)
• On dissolving the old model: “The future isn’t crypto replacing tradfi, it’s the two becoming indistinguishable and the user not caring which is which.” (Ronald, 17:07)

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Key Timestamps

• [03:19] – Ronald’s personal journey from Argentina to Web3/crypto
• [07:36] – What “self-custodial” banking actually changes for the user
• [10:50] – How distribution, not technology, is now the main bottleneck for on-chain finance
• [12:15] – How Tria integrates perps, fiat, yield, and spending in a single app
• [14:41] – The convergence of on-chain money and AI: the coming dissolution of legacy banking
• [16:57] – Tria’s vision for the next five years: the “rails” for universal, programmable accounts

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Tone and Language

The conversation is personal, insightful, and direct—with Ronald speaking candidly about regulatory, technical, and cultural barriers to financial innovation, and Brian asking sharp, relevant follow-ups. The language is clear, sometimes philosophical but always grounded in real technical and business detail.

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Takeaway

Ronald Tato and Tria see self-custodial banking not as a niche innovation, but as the inevitable future of mainstream finance—one where both people and software agents operate frictionless, programmable accounts, and where legacy distinctions between crypto and traditional money quietly disappear.

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Transcript

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[Brian (Host)]

Welcome to Coruscant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast. Do you work in emerging tech? Working on something innovative? Maybe an entrepreneur? Apply to be a guest at www.corusant.com brand 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 500,000 users across 150plus 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 (Guest)]

Hi Brian, thank you very much. Thanks for having me.

[Brian (Host)]

Absolutely my friend. I appreciate it. You're hailing out of Madrid, Spain. I'm in Kansas City, so we're probably 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 (Guest)]

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. So my background in Argentina helped me watch all of these things going on. So I grew up with capital controls, parallel exchange rates and a national memory of the corporate, which I'll explain into that later. So when the government literally froze people's bank accounts, all of a 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 8, 10% on the rail. Workers without a bank account at all, billions of them globally. Engineers from my generation getting paid by US companies and European companies through Payoneer or PayPal, taking another COD 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 lever deeper. When I actually understood how banking rails work and under the hood. So cross border payments isn't slow and expensive because it has to be. It's slow and expensive because the rails were designed in a different century by institutions whose business model depends on the friction. Swift correspondent 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 tiff and incentives. And then you look at what blockchain actually does for gathering money. Near Eastern settlement doesn't care about borders or office hours and the gap is so wide it's almost insulting. There was a moment once they saw both sides, the broken rails and the working alternative, there was no going back. My career since then has been across crypto AI on chain analytics. They spend time on the institutional side of companies like Centura, also on the AI and data side. But the thread connecting all of it has been the same. Understanding how systems for money and intelligence actually work end to end. Because if you only 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. We stayed in touch, but the timing wasn't right back then. What pulled me in eventually was the thesis of a sales 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 infrastructure that institutions already have. One account, the user owns it, transported by default, and it doesn't feel like crypto. So that's the path Argentina taught me. 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 (Host)]

Thank you. Really appreciate that. You know, I know that's been a frustration for a lot of people, even in the us but I just really love the backstory, how you got into Defi and Blockchain. And it truly resonated with you. You saw how banks controlled people's money, how they could freeze money, how these fiat institutions were taking a percentage. And it is, it's like highway robbery. I mean, PayPal and others take, you know, 6% just off the top and it's just, I think it's highway robbery in my opinion. But that's just again, my opinion. So power to the people. And I like your background also. 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 500,000 users across 150 plus countries. Recently $12 million 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 Revolt or Monzo, what does self custodial actually change about the product experience and the user's relationship with their money?

[Ronald Tato (Guest)]

Yeah, the word Neobank is doing a lot of work in our category. To be honest. When people hear, they think about Revolut, Monso and 26. 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 exactly that play out in traditional finance more times than people remember. Self custodial flips that whole relationship. So with Triathlon, 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 stablecoin infrastructure, non synthetic versions wrapped behind a bank. The users holding USDC in their tree account is actually holding usdc. Second, what we cannot do, we can never work fully use our 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 sole bank 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, all yield in it. It becomes the actual primary account, not a crypto site. Wallet and the UX is the same. Social logging, no seed phrases, gas abstracted cross chain feels like one balance. We have visa card, live in 150 plus countries. So from the surface it looks like a clean modern new bank. Underneath the relationship between the user and their money is completely different. So that's what self custodial actually changes. It's not the surface, it's the architecture of trust which is key.

[Brian (Host)]

Love that trust is the key word here. Of course. Yeah, you talked about that, 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 that 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 (Guest)]

Great question Brian. So here's the thing most people miss about on chain perks in 2026 matching speed isn't the bottleneck anymore. Hyper liquid decibel and Aptos these values do sub second 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 ram fiat. They want a card to spend separate company yield under idle balance another so a user who wants what a modern trade Twitter wants execution fiat in, spend out yield on idle is juggling at least five apps, five signups, five places where things break, five different security models. So Tria's 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 onchain perpetual's futures directly into the app. The user doesn't go to decibel, they open. Tria and purse are a tab, same wallet, same balance, same fiat that came in through their virtual account. Same balance they spend from with their card trade closes, proceeds are spendable on the card a moment later. That's a different experience from log into Tria, withdraw to a secs or centralized exchange, trade withdrawal back bridge, so on and so forth. So Aptos was the right execution layer for this because of a speed and finality move. VMs sub second 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 500k plus users across 150 plus countries. We have the card live. We have Fiat Rails coming online, virtual USDC euro virtual accounts. I mean USDC Euro GBP accounts coming this month. We have cross chain routing via Best Path which is our proprietary tech. So add in 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 decentralized exchange that 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 solution account that does everything. Not five apps coordinated by Hope.

[Brian (Host)]

Thank you, that's awesome, I appreciate that. And that's been kind of a pain point for a lot of people that want to get leverage other assets, other again assets on other change, other digital assets. Users obviously need this bridge. They need an interchange. Maybe they're using multiple apps as you talked about. There's hops, potentially multiple security vulnerabilities in this whole process and it's just really frustrating and we've seen that in action. But I like how TRIA leverages decibel to bring in all those assets directly into one platform, making it seamless. Again, less security, I'd say attack service from my perspective here. So thank you Ron. Last question of the day. 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 TRIA play in shaping that world rather than just participating in it?

[Ronald Tato (Guest)]

Great question Brian. So the five to ten year view is where these get really interesting because there are two big shifts happening in parallel and they are going to converge. So the first shift deal assets top being thought of a speculative instrument in becoming how money moves by default. Stablecoins 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, agents start transacting on chain at scale. Agents don't have a bank account, they have wallets, they don't have credit cards, they have 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 and my agents operate through? And that account has to be self custodial because you cannot have an autonomous agent operating off someone else balance sheet. That's not a financial product, that's a legal trap. So Trigon's role in shaping that is not just participating. I'm thinking three things we're building towards right now. One of them is self custody as the default architecture. We took that bit early, early primitive, we add verbs, virtual accounts, lending, eventually credit scenes on top on an account that the user or the user's agent actually controls. Then second the unbundling rebundle. So today consumers Banking is bundled around the bank's product line. Picking account, savings card, loan. We're rebundling it around the user. One balance, one identity, every financial action available from it. Humans first, agents next. The third real world integration. So the Visa card B's 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 is the two becoming indistinguishable and the user not caring which is which. So in five years the goal is a user who has stopped thinking about banking. They have an account, it does everything, it's theirs of course. And their agent has the access to every single corner of it. And TRIA is a rails underneath all of it. Not the bank, not the brand. They obsess over just a layer that makes this whole thing to work. That's what I want to build moving forward on tria.

[Brian (Host)]

That's really cool, I like that. And of course TRIA will be that layer that helps connect the world. You did talk about that. In the future, you know, assets will be available on chain by default. AI agents will have wallets or accounts with programmable rules obviously. And really it takes that headache and that overhead out of the the equation and allows you to really seamlessly do your life transactions with, with this being a second thought. And I really like that and I know Tree is going to 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 (Guest)]

Likewise. Brian, thank you very much for having me. It was a great session.

[Brian (Host)]

Bye for.

[Ronald Tato (Guest)]

It.