How Brazil is embracing “crypto without the chain”

As the central bank’s Drex project retreats from blockchain, stablecoins and private tokenisation platforms are filling the void.

Luiz Souza has watched real estate in Brazil’s southern island of Florianópolis explode over the past decade — and leave the brokers who sell it behind.

Of the 50 brokers who work at Buzz, the brokerage he runs, only three have been able to buy properties. The rest are sitting out a market that has surged 52% over the past five years.¹

He sees a solution in digital rails. Tokenisation, he argues, could allow brokers to buy fractional stakes in properties — as little as 1,000 reais ($200) monthly — without the need for down payments that are often out of their reach. 

“Tokenisation, if we could legally do it, would take the market to another level; it would open a massive market,” Souza told The Node. “People from lower-income classes could invest alongside wealthier investors.”

Real estate tokenisation was one of the use cases being explored by Brazil’s Central Bank (BCB) to include in Drex, the country’s Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC). 

But the concept has faced pushback from Brazilian courts. At the same time, the BCB has stepped back from one of the world’s most ambitious attempts to integrate crypto infrastructure into everyday economic life, leaving the project’s near-term scope less certain.

The goal had been for Drex to bring tokenised assets, smart contracts, and programmable settlement into the regulated financial system. This would build on the huge success of Pix, an instant-payments rail now used by about 93% of Brazilian adults that has normalised real-time, low-friction digital money for millions of users.²

But last November, after privacy tests failed and pilot participants Microsoft and EY reportedly pulled back³, the BCB stripped blockchain out of Drex entirely⁴. What’s left now looks like “crypto without the chain” — a system that borrows from crypto’s conceptual vocabulary but runs inside a tightly controlled, regulated environment.

The reversal signals that Brazil is moving from embracing crypto-style infrastructure to selectively abandoning it, while keeping many of its underlying ideas. What’s emerging is essentially a two-track system. Drex is being focused on institutional settlement infrastructure, while the BCB builds a rigorous regulatory framework for private stablecoins and tokenisation.

Brazil’s retreat from the blockchain-based decentralisation that made Bitcoin revered among crypto-use advocates is becoming more the norm than the exception globally, analysts say. That shift reflects a broader problem: Around the world, CBDCs are struggling to gain retail-level traction in countries that already have successful instant-payment rails like Pix and genuine crypto alternatives. 

Governments stripped out “precisely what makes Bitcoin special: an open, decentralised and censorship-resistant system,” Nick Anthony, a research fellow at the Cato Institute who created the CBDC Tracker at Human Rights Foundation, told The Node. “Instead, they are creating closed, centralised systems for control.” 

Drex swings from blockchain to stablecoin regulation

Brazil, with its history of inflation, currency instability, and dictatorship, has been a leader in financial innovation and real-world crypto adoption. Chainalysis ranked Brazil fifth in its 2025 Global Crypto Adoption Index, up from 10th the prior year.⁵ Its crypto market processes $6 billion to $8 billion a month, with stablecoins accounting for up to 90% of reported transaction volume in some months, according to data from Brazil’s tax authority.⁶ The Brazilian Cryptoeconomy Association (ABcripto) estimates that about 25 million Brazilians – around 12% of the population – hold or transact in crypto.⁷

The BCB launched Drex in 2023 with a pilot focused on tokenising deposits and transactions in federal government bonds. It planned for Drex to have wholesale and retail rails and be based on blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT). 

Two years later, BCB officials announced that Drex would move ahead without the blockchain architecture that had defined the pilot. The BCB decided to shut down the Hyperledger Besu-based test platform used in the pilot and start building new infrastructure. Privacy solutions had failed to strike a balance between preserving regulatory oversight and ensuring transactions remained confidential. In effect, Drex had run into a privacy-security-governance wall.^{8 9}

“It was bombshell news,” recalls Paula Duarte, a researcher in Rio de Janeiro who wrote an academic paper about the need for financial inclusion in Drex.

Rather than wait for Drex to solve the tokenisation problem, the BCB moved to regulate what the private market was already doing. In November 2025, it published three resolutions that operationalise Brazil’s 2022 Virtual Assets Law, effectively integrating crypto assets and stablecoins into the traditional financial system.¹⁰

A few weeks later, Brazil’s stock exchange, B3, said it would launch a Brazilian real-pegged stablecoin and a tokenisation platform in the first half of 2026 — a move intended to fill the gap left by Drex.¹¹

Then, in late April this year, the BCB published a resolution banning electronic foreign exchange providers from using stablecoins and other cryptocurrencies to settle overseas remittances. The rule, due to take effect on Oct. 1, targets regulated e-FX firms like Nomad and Braza Bank that had built stablecoin settlements into cross-border payment flows.¹²

In doing so, the BCB was drawing a careful line: Stablecoins can exist and be regulated as financial instruments, but they cannot become the plumbing of Brazil's cross-border payment system. That remains sovereign territory.

The Pix revolution

South America’s largest economy had long been a country where cash was the only real choice. About 60 million Brazilians¹³, about 28% of the country’s population¹⁴, still do not have a credit card.

Brazil’s instant-payments work dates to 2016, when then-Central Bank president Ilan Goldfajn signalled interest in a Zelle-like instant-payments tool.¹⁵

BCB President Roberto Campos Neto, Goldfajn’s successor, continued the project that became Pix. He later recalled consulting a group of young video gamers about their ideal financial system. Their answer — cheap, transparent, secure, open, and fast — helped shape the priorities behind Pix. The project took on more urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic, when the BCB team learned “there were hundreds of cities that did not have ATM machines,” Campos Neto said in a 2021 lecture at the University of Miami. “People would take a bus to another city to get money.”

Brazil designed Pix to be programmable from the start — built to handle not just instant transfers but scheduled payments, automatic recurring debits, and eventually installment payments that could displace credit cards.¹⁶

Brazilians quickly warmed to Pix. The BCB expected the system to reach 20 million registered Pix aliases in the first six months; it hit that number in three days.¹⁷ From Pix’s launch in November 2020 through September 2025, the platform had moved roughly $16 trillion — more than seven times Brazil's 2024 annual GDP of about $2.2 trillion.¹⁸

The BCB then created a tap-to-pay NFC for contactless Pix payments at point-of-sale terminals and Pix Automático, enabling Brazilians without credit cards to pay for subscriptions and utility bills. 

In 2023, Uruguay became the first country outside Brazil to accept Pix.¹⁹ Since then, the payment system has expanded to Panama, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Venezuela, and Ecuador through private fintech partnerships. 

Private actors test crypto rails minus CBDC

The cost of Drex’s retreat is visible in Florianópolis’ fast-growing real estate market, where the testing of digital rails has stalled. Buzz brokers haven’t done any transactions using crypto in the past 12 months. “There are some financial products linked to real estate using blockchain, but not true integration with property registration,” Clevis Koakoski, Buzz’s founder and director, told The Node.

Nevertheless, some brokers in the region have started to work with property developers to transact with tokenised assets using smart contracts at the sale, or notary, stage. 

Gabriel Carrara, who specializes in land sales, said his biggest bottleneck is regularising properties so they can be sold. More than 60% of real estate transactions in Santa Catarina state, where Florianópolis is located, are conducted through purchase and sale contracts that are never formally registered, Carrara told The Node. “If you look at subdivisions where lots are sold, you have contracts that last 20 years without ever being registered — they are just private agreements between the parties,” he said.

Tokenisation could bring clarity, transparency, and legal certainty to such deals, reducing the risk, for example, of someone selling the same property to more than one person. And it could help to reduce the bureaucracy involved in foreign sales, which today require translation, bilingual contracts, signatures sent internationally and currency-exchange processes. “With tokenisation, all of that is pre-defined,” Carrara said. “The buyer deposits in dollars, the seller receives in reais, and the conversion happens automatically, within minutes.”

But using tokenisation to register properties is still not a viable option.

In August, COFECI, Brazil’s federal real estate brokerage regulator, backed a resolution that opened a path for real estate tokenisation and fractionalization.²⁰ Brokers hoped it would address longstanding bottlenecks, Marcelo Brognoli, president of CRECI-SC, the Santa Catarina regional council that regulates real estate brokers, told The Node.

Two months later, a federal court suspended the resolution, finding that COFECI had likely exceeded its authority by creating a parallel regime for digital transactions and interfering with Brazil’s legal framework for property registries.²¹

“The objective was never to replace the traditional model, but rather to create safe and efficient alternatives, expanding the possibilities for brokers to operate within a more technological environment,” Brognoli said. 

As well as speeding up transactions and lowering brokers’ costs, Drex could have helped crack down on money laundering in real estate, Carrara said. “When I introduce digital money, I create traceability, so I start to have transparency in transactions, and that brings much greater security,” he said.

In agriculture, tokenisation has taken hold in private hands

In agriculture, one of Brazil’s defining economic engines, tokenisation has ballooned on private platforms like Agrotoken, a company founded in Argentina in 2020 that later moved its headquarters to Brazil because of the country’s massive commodities industry. 

Initially, Agrotoken created three grain-backed tokens, with each token representing one ton of grain held in verified storage. Its Proof of Grain Reserve system was designed to ensure that issued tokens are fully backed by real grain reserves and that the same grain cannot be used twice.

In mid-2024, Agrotoken rebranded to Justoken to offer tokenisation across multiple industries, including land and real estate, livestock, energy, forestry, and sustainability. Today, Justoken oversees $2.8 billion in tokenised assets, Ariel Scaliter, the company’s co-founder and CTO, told The Node.

Justoken’s infrastructure has evolved outside Drex. It has utilized Ethereum, Polygon, and Algorand, explored Polkadot-based infrastructure, and more recently tokenised substantial real-world assets on XRPL. “Those of us who are in the business of tokenising real assets, especially those of us who create infrastructure, do not depend on Drex at all,” Scaliter said. “Drex is an additional layer.”

Other countries’ retail CBDCs are flagging

Around the world, CBDCs are struggling to find organic adoption at scale. In countries that already have strong payment infrastructure — Brazil with Pix, India with Unified Payments Interface (UPI), China with Alipay/WeChat and Europe with Single Euro Payments Area (SEPA) — a retail CBDC is a solution to a problem that’s already being solved.

India hit its initial goal of one million daily e-rupee transactions by the end of 2023, but after bank incentives were reduced, usage plummeted 90%.²² Singapore has taken the opposite approach — focusing on wholesale plumbing between institutions rather than consumer wallets. It completed its first live interbank CBDC trial in late 2025.²³

Drex could still matter if it becomes the trusted “layer zero” that authenticates assets, coordinates institutions, and gives legal certainty to tokenised markets. And the Central Bank may not need to invent every use case. It could watch industries develop standards and then build the authentication or settlement layer around them.

“The intention of the central bank, including with Drex, had more to do with the wholesale market, because it makes no sense to implement a currency when Pix exists,” said Scaliter. “[The BCB] can’t offer CBDC solutions that Pix already solves in a much more efficient way.”

By Alexei Barrionuevo

¹Fundação Instituto de Pesquisas Econômicas. 2025. “Índice FipeZAP.” FIPE. https://www.fipe.org.br/pt-br/indices/fipezap/

²Banco Central do Brasil. 2025. Relatório de Cidadania Financeira 2025. Brasília: Banco Central do Brasil. https://www.bcb.gov.br/content/cidadaniafinanceira/documentos_cidadania/RIF/relatorio_de_cidadania_financeira_2025.pdf

Banco Central do Brasil. 2026. “Pix em números.” Banco Central do Brasil. Accessed May 11, 2026. https://www.bcb.gov.br/estabilidadefinanceira/pix-em-numeros-estatisticas

³Bomfim, Ricardo. 2025. “Empresas ‘pisam no freio’ no Drex e chamam atenção para dificuldades com o BC.” Valor Econômico, April 9, 2025, updated April 10, 2025. https://valor.globo.com/financas/criptomoedas/noticia/2025/04/09/empresas-pisam-no-freio-no-drex-e-chamam-ateno-para-dificuldades-com-o-bc.ghtml

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⁶CoinDesk. 2025. “Stablecoins Drive 90% of Brazil’s Crypto Vthat olume, Tax Authority Data Shows.” CoinDesk, November 29, 2025. https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2025/11/30/stablecoins-drive-90-of-brazil-s-crypto-volume-tax-authority-data-shows

⁷Silva, Mariana Maria. 2026. “ABcripto quer colocar ativos digitais em pauta eleitoral para 2026.” Exame, January 15, 2026. https://exame.com/future-of-money/abcripto-quer-colocar-ativos-digitais-em-pauta-eleitoral-para-2026/

⁸Finsiders Brasil. 2025. “BC desliga plataforma Drex e diz que criará nova infraestrutura.” Finsiders Brasil, November 4, 2025, updated November 11, 2025. https://finsidersbrasil.com.br/pagamentos/drex/bc-desliga-plataforma-drex-e-diz-que-criara-nova-infraestrutura/

⁹Banco Central do Brasil. 2025. Relatório do Piloto Drex: Fase 1. Brasília: Banco Central do Brasil. https://www.bcb.gov.br/content/estabilidadefinanceira/real_digital_docs/piloto/Relatorio_Drex_piloto_fase_1.pdf

¹⁰BDO. 2026. "Brazil — Central Bank Unveils Regulatory Framework for the Virtual Asset Market." February 16, 2026. https://www.bdo.global/en-gb/insights/tax/world-wide-tax/brazil-central-bank-unveils-regulatory-framework-for-the-virtual-asset-market

¹¹Quiroz-Gutierrez, Marco. 2025. "Brazilian Stock Exchange B3 to Launch Its Own Tokenization Platform and Stablecoin." CoinDesk, December 17, 2025. https://www.coindesk.com/business/2025/12/17/brazilian-stock-exchange-b3-to-launch-its-own-tokenization-platform-and-stablecoin

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¹⁴Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística. 2025. "Country's Estimated Population Reaches 213.4 Million Residents in 2025." Agência de Notícias IBGE, August 28, 2025. https://agenciadenoticias.ibge.gov.br/en/agencia-news/2184-news-agency/news/44318-populacao-estimada-do-pais-chega-a-213-4-milhoes-de-habitantes-em-2026

¹⁵Agência Brasil. 2025. "Documentos do BC mostram que bases do Pix foram lançadas em 2018." July 19, 2025. hinstallmentttps://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/economia/noticia/2025-07/documentos-do-bc-mostram-que-bases-do-pix-foram-lancadas-em-2018

¹⁶Banco Central do Brasil. 2023. Pix Management Report: Conception and First Years of Operation 2020–2022. Brasília: Banco Central do Brasil. https://www.bcb.gov.br/content/estabilidadefinanceira/pix/relatorio_de_gestao_pix/pix_management_report_2023.pdf

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²²Allison, Ian. 2026. "India Pushes e-Rupee Through Welfare Pilots as BRICS Digital Currency Plan Takes Shape." CoinDesk, April 24, 2026. https://www.coindesk.com/policy/2026/04/24/india-pushes-digital-rupee-through-welfare-pilots-as-brics-cbdc-plan-takes-shape

²³Monetary Authority of Singapore. 2025. “MAS Announces Successful Live Trial of Settlement of Interbank Overnight Lending Using Wholesale Central Bank Digital Currency.” News release, November 13, 2025. https://www.mas.gov.sg/news/media-releases/2025/mas-announces-successful-live-trial-of-settlement-of-interbank-overnight-lending