On October 14, 2024, the Central Bank of Brazil revealed that stablecoins account for 90% of cryptocurrency transactions in the country, highlighting the regulatory challenges they pose. Gabriel Galipolo, the bank's president, stated this at a Bank for International Settlements event in Mexico City.
Galipolo also clarified that Brazil's Drex digital currency project is not a central bank digital currency (CBDC). Instead, Drex is being developed as an infrastructure project aimed at improving credit accessibility through collateralized assets. The project will utilize distributed ledger technology to settle wholesale interbank transactions, with retail access based on tokenized bank deposits.
Drex is intended to replace the country's real-time gross settlement system, the Sistema de Transferência de Reservas (STR). The digital asset is envisioned as "STR 2.0," but further details are needed before its operational launch.
Brazil's crypto activity is second only to Argentina in Latin America. A Chainalysis report from October 9, 2024, indicated that Brazilian crypto users deposited approximately $90 billion in digital assets between July 2023 and June 2024. Notably, stablecoin volume during that period reached 59.8%.
In August 2024, e-commerce platform Mercado Libre introduced a dollar-pegged stablecoin called the "Meli Dollar" in Brazil, coinciding with a surge in crypto trading. Globally, stablecoins have witnessed significant adoption in 2024, surpassing major traditional finance players in transfer volumes. On January 31, 2024, crypto exchange CEX.io reported that the annual stablecoin transfer volume reached $27.6 trillion, exceeding the combined volumes of Visa and Mastercard.