Lemon Shuts Its Brazil Business and Will Close 15,000 Accounts

Lemon is closing its Brazilian business and will shut about 15,000 customer accounts on 16 October, having decided that the capital Banco Central now asks of a licensed virtual-asset provider is out of proportion to what the company does in the country. New deposits in reais have already stopped. Card payments end on 30 September. Brazil's first-stage licence filing deadline is 30 October, so the platform is leaving two weeks before it would have had to file. crypto.news reported the decision on Friday morning and CoinGape carried it the same day, both giving the same four dates and the same account count.

What the licence asks for

Brazil's PSAV regime took effect on 2 February 2026 under Banco Central Resolutions 519, 520 and 521. Resolution 520 is the authorisation rulebook, covering company form, minimum capital, governance and fit-and-proper tests on controllers and officers. After 30 October, dealing with an unauthorised provider is prohibited. The capital figures themselves are harder to pin down. A KuCoin flash of 14 September, crediting ME News through BlockBeats, puts the floor at about 10.8 million reais for the lower licence tier and about 37.2 million for the upper one, against an original proposal of 1 million to 3 million, and says analysts expect around ten firms to clear the bar. That flash is the only account read here carrying those numbers, and the resolution text itself was not retrieved, so the figures stand as one source's.

Lemon says little about its own numbers

The company has not published what it earned in Brazil, what the 15,000 accounts hold, how far short of the threshold it stood, or whether it filed anything before deciding. Neither account read here establishes any of it. What both do say is that Lemon will contact every affected user and help move balances out before the October date. Nothing from Banco Central about Lemon was retrievable on Sunday.

Who leaves and who files

Lemon is not the first out. Coinext closed after failing to meet the minimum capital. Digitra wound down its retail trading, and Crypto.com is ending accounts denominated in reais by 25 October. Those three departures come from CoinGape alone in this sweep, as does the list of firms going the other way. Binance holds approval and has relaunched its Brazilian card. Coinbase has widened its USDC-earn products there, and Ripple is working through a VASP application. A capital floor sorts a market by balance sheet before it sorts it by anything else. Binance stopped serving EU users when MiCA's transition window closed in July, and CoinEx gave its users until 22 December to withdraw earlier this month.

Where the capital goes instead

Lemon says what it frees up will go to its other markets. It counts more than a million users in Peru, where it holds an SBS licence, and more than 150,000 in Colombia. CoinGape adds that bitcoin buying on the Argentine app reached a 20-month high, a detail only that account carries. Argentina, where the company started, takes the rest. None of the accounts read here puts a number on what is being redirected, or on what the Brazilian operation cost to run.

The 30 October date is the one still open. Brazil will have a licensed market from that morning and a ban on dealing with everyone outside it, and the count of firms that made it through has not been published. Lemon's users have until 16 October to take their money out.