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digital public infrastructure

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All Government Is a Tech Company Now (And This Is Not Going Away)

Brazil's Central Bank, the Banco Central do Brasil (BCB), is responsible for Pix. It is the country's instant payment rail, launched in November 2020, that reduced peer-to-peer transaction costs to zero and processed R$ 26.5 trillion in 2024 alone, a 54% increase over the prior year, across 63 billion transactions. Pix now moves more volume annually than Visa and Mastercard combined. It runs 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And it is operated and supervised by an institution that, between 2009...

Digital public infrastructurePinned

When you're a whole on the internet

Most of us exist online as a jigsaw puzzle scattered across a table. A LinkedIn profile. A Bluesky account. An old Twitter handle. A forum username from 2009. The pieces are all there, but assembling them takes work, and that friction, it turns out, has been doing a lot of social work that nobody explicitly designed. The HTTP-era internet was never built with identity coherence in mind (or, identity at all). Each service captured a slice of you independently. The result was fragmentation by acci...

Age verification, verifiable credentials, and the privacy tension rising from the debate

I left a job in March 2025 after years of engineering and researching privacy and identity at the forefront of the KYC industry, more specifically with biometrics and liveness identification. KYC is the infrastructure built to verify who someone is before granting them access to a transaction. That same year, I was invited by the Ministry of Justice (by the secretary of Digital Rights, Dr. Lilian Cintra), to join the technical committee contributing to what would become Decree 12.880, which regu...

Digital public infrastructureidentity

Build It and They'll Come: How Fraud Co-Evolves with Digital Infrastructure

Part 2 of 2. Part 1 covered the history of digital identity in Brazil and the data infrastructure that made industrial-scale fraud possible. This piece examines why fraud doesn't attack weak systems, but good ones, and what that means for every country building digital public infrastructure today. There is a pattern in Brazil's fraud history that becomes visible only in retrospect. Every major expansion of digital infrastructure, for example: pix, frictionless onboarding, facial biometrics, What...

Built for Access: How Brazil's Identity System Opened a Door It Wasn't Designed to Close

Part 1 of 2. This piece covers the history of digital identity in Brazil and the data infrastructure that made industrial scale fraud possible. Part 2 covers how fraud co-evolves with digital infrastructure, and what that means for every country building digital infrastructure for identities today. We tend to talk about digital fraud as if it were a technology problem. A bug to patch, a model to retrain, a vendor to procure. But the deeper you look at how Brazil's identity infrastructure actuall...

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