Nirium at The Open Deal Room by Stellar

On May 21, 2026, Nirium was featured at The Open Deal Room by Stellar, hosted inside BBVA Tower in Mexico City. We were one of six Stellar ecosystem startups invited to La Arena - a curated room where builders present in front of venture investors, angels, and institutional players active in the Mexican fintech landscape.

It is not every day that an autonomous, on-chain treasury agent gets to stand in the lobby of one of Latin America's largest banks. That contrast is exactly the point.

The pitch, beat by beat

“As a founder, I was my own treasurer - and I slept. So did the money.”

- Giovanny Amador, opening the pitch

We opened with a problem every Mexican founder feels: corporate cash sits idle. It loses roughly 10% a year to inflation while it sleeps in an account, and keeping it productive is a 24/7 manual job nobody has time for.

Then the turn - Nirium wakes the money that sleeps. An autonomous agent moves idle USDC into CETES, Mexican sovereign debt, through Etherfuse, and back to liquid the moment it is needed: instantly, and without a treasury desk.

We closed on the team: Giovanny Amador (Founder) and Monserrat Mendoza (Co-founder). A team that has already shipped together.

What we presented

We walked the room through the core of Nirium: a non-custodial agent that moves idle corporate USDC into Mexican government bonds (CETES) through Etherfuse, designed to run around the clock, with a Soroban contract enforcing every transfer.

The message we kept returning to is the security pattern that makes this safe to put in front of institutions. An AI agent can read the market and propose a rebalance, but it never holds custody - a Soroban vault (NiriumVault, on testnet) enforces delegation scopes on-chain, so a compromised or hallucinating agent physically cannot move funds the contract did not authorize. (Corrected 12 Nov 2026: this post first called NiriumVault a 2-of-3 multisig. The contract supports a 2-of-3 emergency pause, with no cosigners registered yet; a withdrawal needs only the owner's signature.)

The LLM proposes, the contract decides.

Why the venue matters

Tokenized real-world assets in Mexico are no longer a thesis on a slide. CETES on Stellar via a regulated operator is a live corridor, and seeing it discussed inside BBVA Tower - rather than a hackathon side room - signals how quickly institutional appetite is forming. Nirium's position is deliberately software-only and non-custodial: regulated third parties handle settlement, while we provide the rails developers and fintechs embed.

What we took away

Beyond the pitch, the value of La Arena was the conversations it opened - with investors and ecosystem operators who understand both the Stellar stack and the Mexican regulatory context. Those are the relationships that turn a working testnet protocol into a funded, audited, mainnet product. We left with new threads to pull, and a clearer read on what institutional partners need to see next: verifiable adoption, not promises.