PANews reported on February 7 that according to Cointelegraph, Gabriel Galipolo, president of the Central Bank of Brazil, said at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS) conference that 90% of cryptocurrency transactions in Brazil are related to stablecoins. He pointed out that the widespread use of stablecoins in the payment field has brought about compliance challenges such as tax supervision and anti-money laundering.
In addition, Galipolo clarified that Brazil's Drex digital currency project is not a central bank digital currency (CBDC), but a financial infrastructure project based on distributed ledger technology (DLT) that aims to improve credit accessibility through collateral assets. Drex is mainly used for wholesale interbank settlement, while the retail end relies on tokenized bank deposits. Drex plans to replace Brazil's existing real-time gross settlement system (STR) in the future.
Brazil is the second largest crypto adoption country in Latin America after Argentina. According to Chainalysis data, the country deposited approximately $90 billion in crypto assets between July 2023 and June 2024, of which stablecoin transactions accounted for 59.8%. In August 2024, e-commerce giant Mercado Libre launched the dollar-pegged stablecoin "Meli Dollar". Globally, the annual transaction volume of stablecoins in 2024 reached $27.6 trillion, surpassing the total transaction volume of Visa and Mastercard.
