Bruno Caratori

A change of mind that became a company

In 2012, a friend kept telling Bruno Caratori to buy Bitcoin. Caratori, an electrical engineer with a career in financial risk, was unconvinced. His friend, he later recalled, "was already trying to convince everybody and their grandmother to buy something that had no intrinsic value." The idea struck him as absurd, and he said so.

That friend was Marcelo Sampaio. Six years later, the two would co-found Hashdex together. The distance between those two facts - the dismissal and the partnership - is the most interesting thing about Caratori. He did not arrive at crypto as a true believer. He argued his way there.

The turn came with Ethereum. What shifted for Caratori was not the price chart but the idea underneath it. Bitcoin's real innovation, as he came to see it, "wasn't just electronic cash - it was that a group of people could achieve consensus without a central authority." Once he understood that, the earlier skepticism looked less like caution and more like a missed premise. In early 2018, he and Sampaio founded Hashdex.

Hyperinflation was the first teacher

Before there was any argument about consensus mechanisms, there was Brazil. Caratori grew up during a period of hyperinflation, and he has been direct about how that experience shaped him. "You learn you can't always trust the guardian of your money," he has said. It is a plain sentence with a long reach - it explains why an engineer would find something compelling in an asset that is, in his words, "invisible, fixed supply, non-sovereign."

That background gives his work a texture that pure finance careers often lack. Where some crypto founders speak in the language of disruption, Caratori tends to speak in the language of trust and its absence. The pitch is not that the old system is broken for sport. It is that people who have lived through currency collapse understand, at a gut level, why an alternative might matter.

From risk desks to product to the top job

Caratori's path to crypto ran through some unglamorous but formative rooms. Early in his career he worked at RiskControl, a software company serving the financial markets that Accenture acquired in 2010. He then led the risk area at Gavea Investimentos, one of Brazil's well-known asset managers. From there he stepped outside finance entirely, spending around five years leading product at Edmodo, at the time one of the largest social education networks in the world.

That mix - risk discipline plus product instinct - is unusual, and it maps neatly onto what Hashdex set out to do: package something volatile and new inside the governance and structure that institutions require. When the firm launched, Caratori served as chief operating officer, building what the company describes as the institutional-grade infrastructure behind its regulated investment platform.

In March 2026, that behind-the-scenes builder moved to the front. Hashdex named Caratori Global CEO, with co-founder Marcelo Sampaio becoming Executive Chairman and Mick McLaughlin taking the U.S. CEO role. It was a promotion from within rather than an outside hire - a co-founder who had spent years as COO knowing, as the saying goes, where every wire ran. "I am honored to step into the role of Global CEO at such an important moment for our industry," he said.

Regulated crypto, and a wager on stablecoins

Hashdex made its name in the plumbing of regulated crypto: index products, exchange-traded funds, and the discipline of doing digital assets the way traditional markets expect. Caratori frames the current moment as one of adoption rather than hype. "Digital assets are becoming an established part of global portfolios, and investors increasingly seek regulated, transparent, and diversified access," he said on taking the CEO role.

Looking further out, his attention turns to money itself. Caratori has been vocal that the next large shift may be in stablecoins and tokenized finance. "Large shifts are upon us in a way we still can't understand. The market for stablecoins is going to be enormous," he has said. It is a characteristically measured forecast - big in ambition, careful in claim, and consistent with a founder who prefers to build for a decade rather than a headline.

Three schools, three disciplines

A few things about Bruno Caratori

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