Brazil's Crypto Filing Deadline Lands With No Firm Yet Licensed

Brazil's deadline for crypto firms already trading in the country to apply for central bank authorisation fell on Friday, and the public register showed no authorised provider at all. A filing made in time lets a firm keep serving customers while the Banco Central do Brasil reviews it. A firm that misses the date has 30 days to stop. The banking cut-off once set for the same day now falls on 6 November, moved by Resolution BCB 589 so the regulator has a week to publish a list of the institutions it treats as in transition. That list has not appeared.

What the register shows, and what firms say

A reading of the central bank's open data on Thursday found eight authorisation processes open and not one finished. Seven carried names: Transfero, Onda Finance, Wynx Exchange, Mazzera, PFPay, Masterpay and W Brasil. The eighth had no segment recorded against it. Four exchanges say they have filed and appear nowhere on that list, among them Mercado Bitcoin, OKX, Bybit and Binance, which applied through its local entity on 23 October. Absence is not refusal. The data records processes the bank has opened, and a package lodged days before the deadline may not be in it yet.

Two counts that do not reconcile

Valor Economico reported in September, citing internal sources, that five providers had applied, one had been refused and four were under review. The open-data reading from Thursday gives eight live processes. Those counts cannot both be current, and we could not establish which of the two the bank would recognise. The single refusal on the record is Higherway Tech Solucoes, trading as Higher Global Payments, decided on 25 August and published in the official gazette a month later. The notice gave no grounds. The company said it was reviewing the decision with legal and regulatory advisers. Valor's account of an applicant turned down for failing to show it was operating in Brazil before 2 February does not name the firm, so it cannot be tied to that decision.

Filings in the final week

Coinbase applied on Wednesday, two days out, and a spokesperson said the company does not expect the review to require suspending its existing services. Itau Unibanco went a different way the day before. Banks the central bank has already authorised notify it instead of applying, and Itau's 27 October notice covered the trading and custody service it has run since December 2023 across 15 assets, among them bitcoin, ether and USDC. CoinDesk called it the first bank in the country to put its crypto business on the new footing. Submissions of either kind need an independent technical certification. Foxbit and B3, which operates the Brazilian exchange, have said they will file and have not said when.

The week that sorts the market

Resolution 589 did more than move a date. The old text barred banks and payment institutions from dealing with providers that were neither authorised nor in the authorisation process, and the new text refers only to counterparties that are not authorised, dropping the explicit cover for pending applicants. On that reading a firm that filed on time could still lose its banking access on 6 November unless the transition list carries it, so the list now matters more than the deadline it was created to soften. Some firms have already chosen. Lemon said in September it was winding down locally, Bity is selling its two businesses to domestic buyers, and HTX left Britain this week, giving undertakings to the High Court on the way out. Brazil moves roughly $318.8 billion of crypto a year on Chainalysis data cited by compliance advisers, with stablecoins close to 90% of that flow. One tracker puts the end of the 30-day wind-down for non-filers at 29 November.