Rayls x AmFi AMA recap: bringing Brazil's tokenised private credit onchain
Yesterday, AmFi co-founder João Pirola joined Marcos Viriato and Alex Buelau, co-founders of Parfin, the main developer of Rayls, for a live AMA on tokenised private credit in Brazil. The main points: AmFi builds the whole receivables back end onchain, it is moving to Rayls for scale and composability, and both teams would rather deliver than overpromise. This recap covers who spoke, the key takeaways and what the partnership means for Rayls.
The AMA came a month after Rayls and AmFi announced their partnership, and follows our recent AMA with Núclea on tokenising receivables in Brazil.
Who spoke at the Rayls x AmFi AMA?
- João Pirola, CPO and co-founder of AmFi, Brazil's tokenised private-credit platform
- Marcos Viriato, CEO and co-founder of Parfin, the main developer of Rayls
- Alex Buelau, co-founder and CPTO of Parfin
All three were in São Paulo.
Why did AmFi's founders move from TradFi to onchain credit?
João began his career at one of Brazil's largest asset managers. It ran around $20 billion in assets, and he said it ran them on Excel macros. He then co-founded Grafeno, a banking-as-a-service business for Brazilian credit markets that brought more than 500 investment funds onto its platform.
AmFi came out of the DeFi summer of 2020 and 2021. João described the gap this way:
"The bakery on the corner should be benefiting from DeFi concepts, but they don't carry Bitcoin. They don't have wallets, actually, but they do have receivables."
Alex asked how manual traditional finance still is, and João told a story from 2018. A Grafeno client asked to get an email when money landed in an escrow account. "Just receiving a simple email when something happened on a bank account was really revolutionary for this kind of operation," he said.
What is AmFi actually building onchain?
AmFi specialises in receivables financing, a part of Brazil's credit market that João said has grown about 15% a year for more than ten years. For a primer on the asset class, see how real-world asset tokenisation could transform financial markets.
João argued that the buyer-facing front end is "only the tip of the iceberg". The hard part is the back end. AmFi runs it onchain in two layers.
The asset side
Every receivable is tokenised, such as a card sale at a bakery or an invoice between two companies. One portfolio can hold tens of thousands of receivables, sometimes as many as 100,000. AmFi was the first platform to use the infrastructure Rayls built with Núclea, one of Brazil's registrars for receivables. Assets that arrive that way are already registered and verified. Read more in our Núclea case study.
The investor side
Investors buy securitisation tokens, which bundle receivables under rules designed to protect them. Each pool's purchases, repayments and allocations are recorded onchain. João said investors get an "instant, twenty-four seven" view of their portfolio. Comparable products in traditional markets usually report weekly or monthly.
Why is AmFi building on Rayls?
João gave two reasons.
Scalability
João said the average ticket in AmFi's lending pools is about $1,000. Short-dated receivables are repaid and replaced quickly, and each receivable creates several transactions: minting, sale, payment and repayment. João estimated that with $1 billion in assets on the platform, AmFi would see at least 3 million transactions every month. He said current open blockchain infrastructures "really are not suitable" for that kind of load.
Composability
"We're not focused on the infrastructure layer. We're focused on the application layer, especially the financial application layer."
João said being part of a larger ecosystem with shared standards for stablecoins, securities and investment vaults matters to AmFi. He named accepting USDT and USDC directly as a key step. Today, investors' stablecoins are converted to Brazilian reais behind the scenes.
Why do both teams prefer to deliver rather than promise?
João said AmFi tries "to not overpromise". Marcos and Alex took the same line. Marcos said: "It's more important that we deliver than we promise." Alex was more direct about crypto's habit of overpromising:
"We are allergic to that. We like to show the work and deliver."
How does AmFi think about returns?
João said AmFi focuses on short-term, liquid receivables backed by real business activity, rather than chasing the headline yields often promised in crypto. The aim is steady returns that come from real-world credit, not from token incentives.
This recap is for information only. It is not investment advice or an offer of any product.
How could zero-knowledge proofs make private credit more trustworthy?
João said AmFi checks off-chain data against at least ten market infrastructures, including banks, registries and credit bureaus. Originators still send their track records in spreadsheets that are hard to verify.
Marcos described a Rayls feature in development: zero-knowledge proofs that confirm events such as whether an invoice was issued or a receivable was registered. One goal he described is for staked RLS to help validate those proofs, alongside its role in securing the Public Chain. João called verifiable onchain credit histories "a complete game changer" for how originators are assessed.
What does the partnership mean for Rayls?
With the Rayls Public Chain heading to mainnet, Marcos said the first step will be lending pools and yield-bearing vaults on the Public Chain, where people can bring stablecoins and invest in assets that AmFi originates. Marcos also pointed to partners such as Animoca Brands, which signed an MOU with Rayls, as a way to introduce these opportunities to a wider global audience. He said large fund managers and family offices have already shown interest. Alex and Marcos also explained that Rayls Private Network clients pay fees tied to RLS, and that part of those tokens will be burned; see Rayls tokenomics for how RLS works.
João said AmFi's priorities for 2026 are to:
- migrate its infrastructure to Rayls
- obtain a broader regulated licence in Brazil
- grow significantly on its 2025 volume
- work with banks and the region's largest asset managers
To see how our AMAs began, read the recap of our first Rayls AMA.
Bringing private credit or receivables onchain? Talk to the institutional team or see how the Rayls Public Chain connects institutional assets to onchain liquidity.
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