El Dorado Raised $9M From Paradigm and Built a Neobank on Tempo

From mining to payments

Guillermo Goncalvez says he built one of the biggest Bitcoin mining businesses in Venezuela and sold it in 2017. He says El Dorado was one of the first startups in LatAm to launch Tether USDt on Tron. Today the app offers QR payments across five LatAm countries and cross-border payments across 12, and he says it has over 1,000,000 customers.

In Bolivia, he says, El Dorado is consistently ranked among the five or 10 most popular financial applications.

Why business banking

Guillermo Goncalvez says demand came from existing users: drop-shippers and importers buying from Alibaba and Temu. The product was also built for the company itself. El Dorado raised nearly 95% of its funds in stablecoins, and he says managing stablecoins is complex even for a crypto native startup.

He argues that with Safe, MPC Vault and Squads as the only multisig options in crypto, the gap for a more fintech oriented solution is huge.

Building on Tempo

Guillermo Goncalvez says the team saw synergy in a payments-first blockchain. On Tempo, transaction fees are paid in a set of stablecoins at a fixed fee, he says, and a privacy layer is being built by a team led by Georgios, CTO of Paradigm. He adds that Matt sitting on the board of Stripe opens doors for corporate relationships, and that Tempo has a relationship with Bridge for corporate cards.

A physical branch

Rather than digital ads, El Dorado is opening an office in Santa Cruz de la Sierra where individuals and business owners can come Monday through Saturday to solve issues or process payments to China, Guillermo Goncalvez says.