In the early hours of June 30, at 00:18, Rocelo Lopes, CEO of SmartPay and creator of the self-custody wallet Truther, detected unusual activity on the company’s platforms and immediately tightened validation filters for USDT and Bitcoin purchases. The swift action helped retain large sums of money and initiate immediate refunds to the involved institutions.
“There were over 30 attempted transactions—we prefer not to disclose the amounts to protect the companies, but we are fully available to authorities and institutions to support operations involving cryptoassets. Over the years, we’ve gained extensive experience in monitoring suspicious crypto transactions through tools and processes we developed, aligned with deep market and blockchain technology expertise. I believe we can contribute significantly to this incident,” says Rocelo Lopes.
According to SmartPay’s CEO, the incident highlights that the financial system must evolve, moving from a vulnerable centralized structure to mechanisms capable of tracking transactions and freezing suspicious funds in real time. “They focused on monitoring clients and institutions but overlooked what happens beyond them. The private infrastructure is sound, but what follows isn’t,” he assesses.
Rocelo emphasizes that blockchain could have mitigated or even prevented part of the loss by enabling transaction tracking from the source using immutable “digital stamps” that would facilitate instant blocking of suspicious funds via smart contracts. “If fraud is detected, the system automatically freezes the transaction and requests explanations from the recipient. We can also embed encrypted data like geolocation, IP, and user identification in the transaction,” he explains.
Beyond traceability, blockchain offers privacy and security to users by transferring transaction key custody to the client and decentralizing risks. “When centralized, the attack surface is easier. When decentralized, even balances aren’t visible for attacks. The user becomes responsible for their own keys, as we already do with Truther,” he points out.
For Rocelo, public blockchains—not private ones—are the real path to modernizing the financial system, taking the burden of safeguarding millions of clients’ funds away from institutions while ensuring transparency and security for the ecosystem.
Asset tokenization is also highlighted as a solution to isolate risks and shield operations from fraud through auditable, real-time trackable smart contracts, with the potential to automatically collect taxes, reducing operational costs and bureaucracy.
Despite scalability challenges, the market is already testing solutions, such as biometrics for private key recovery and second-layer blockchains like Liquid and Rails. “We’re testing palm-based key recovery in Brazil, ensuring security even if devices are lost,” reveals Rocelo.
For the CEO, blockchain is not just an extra security layer but a real path to modernizing the national financial system, improving traceability, reducing fraud, and lowering compliance costs. “Blockchain is the fastest way to track and remove money from circulation in suspicious transactions while combating money laundering and currency evasion,” he states.
International experiences reinforce this view, such as the use of stablecoins and blockchain for payments in Switzerland and Argentina, where Brazilians can already pay via PIX, instantly converted to USDT, with complete transaction records.
Rocelo stresses that Brazil could lead this transformation if the Central Bank and regulators support startups and companies developing these solutions. “The billion-dollar hack is a wake-up call that we need to evolve—and fast. Blockchain, intelligent monitoring, and cooperation among stakeholders are crucial to shielding the financial system and preventing large-scale losses,” he concludes.
