Brazil bars stablecoins from eFX settlement leg under Resolution 561

Stablecoins lose access to one wholesale settlement channel from 1 October

Brazil’s central bank has barred stablecoins and other virtual assets from settling the wholesale foreign-exchange leg between regulated FX providers and their overseas counterparties from 1 October 2026, under Resolution 561. The restriction does not touch individual international transfers, which remain permitted under the existing framework.

Resolution 561 requires that the settlement leg between a regulated foreign-exchange provider and its foreign counterparty run through a licensed FX transaction or a qualifying non-resident real account instead. The rule closes part of a gap left open since 2022, when Brazil’s virtual assets law gave the central bank authority to decide which crypto operations count as foreign-exchange activity. The specific rules never followed, and some market participants used the gap to their advantage, as the central bank has now moved to shut down the aggregated channel.

The market the rule lands on

The timing matters because Brazil is one of the largest stablecoin markets in the world. Brazil’s tax authority, the Receita Federal, recorded R$1.13 trillion in declared stablecoin transactions between August 2019 and December 2025, roughly 72% of all declared crypto activity in that window, and stablecoins made up close to 80% of declared crypto volume in 2025 alone. USDT accounted for nearly 89% of the stablecoin total.

Those figures cover declared activity across all uses, not the settlement channel the resolution restricts. No publicly isolated figure for the affected eFX settlement volume is available, and the tax-authority data does not measure the restricted channel directly.

Who feels it: brokers, not remittance senders

Shawn Yan, chief executive of payments infrastructure firm Cregis, said brokers use stablecoins internally for treasury management, moving liquidity between entities and internal settlement, all invisible to the end client. Legal expert Oscar Guillermo Farah Osorio, founding partner at Zanella & Farah, expects the added foreign-exchange, correspondent-bank and SWIFT fees that stablecoin settlement previously avoided will eventually land on Brazilian consumers and businesses.

The cost argument has a counterweight. A July study by Banca d’Italia tested $200 USDC transfers across ten international corridors, including Brazil, and found total costs between 0.3% and nearly 9%, with no consistent advantage over conventional payment channels; the blockchain leg itself was a marginal share of the cost, and settlement in the study finished in under 20 minutes where instant payment systems existed. The Financial Stability Board reached a similar conclusion in July.

Farah also questions why individual international stablecoin transfers stay permitted while the aggregated eFX version does not, given that regulated providers could plausibly supply the same underlying transaction data the central bank wants either way.

Resolution 561 takes effect on 1 October 2026.