Crypto enters the age of regulation in Brazil. And that changes more than the market

For years, part of crypto culture sold a very seductive idea: if the technology was born to eliminate intermediaries, then the further from the State, the better.

Brazil's reality in 2026 decided to complicate that story.

On October 30, the deadline expired for virtual asset service providers already in operation to submit to the Central Bank the documents required by the authorization process.

And there was a rush.

A survey published by Exame, based on monitoring by Cainvest and on information released by the companies themselves, pointed to 63 institutions linked to authorization requests. The list includes well-known names from the crypto world, such as Binance, Coinbase, Kraken, Bitget, OKX, Bybit and Mercado Bitcoin. But it also includes institutions at the heart of the traditional financial system, such as Itaú, Bradesco, BTG Pactual, Banco Inter and B3.

The number calls for a journalistic caveat: when the survey closed, there was no consolidated public list from the Central Bank that would allow the 63 institutions to be treated as an official, definitive count of license requests. There are also procedural differences between companies that need authorization and institutions already supervised by the Central Bank.

But the phenomenon is bigger than the count.

The picture is curious: banks, fintechs, international exchanges, blockchain infrastructure firms and stablecoin companies now stand before the same regulator.

It doesn't look exactly like the end of the traditional financial system that some imagined in Bitcoin's early years.

Maybe it is something more interesting: the beginning of its transformation.

The Wild West is getting smaller

Brazil did not decide to regulate cryptocurrencies overnight.

Law No. 14,478, passed in 2022, laid the legal foundations for providing virtual asset services in the country. Later, the Central Bank was given the power to regulate, authorize and supervise companies in the sector.

BCB Resolution No. 520, published in November 2025, moved precisely into that territory: it set rules for the incorporation and operation of virtual asset service providers and for already authorized institutions that wish to offer these services.

In practice, the activity begins to leave a much more open regulatory zone and starts living with requirements similar to those expected of other relevant players in the financial system.

That includes governance, internal controls, capital requirements, risk management, security, anti-money laundering and criteria for protecting and segregating client funds.

It is not a small change.

And it becomes even more concrete on November 6.

From that date, Central Bank rules prohibit financial institutions, payment institutions and other entities authorized by the Central Bank from carrying out or enabling certain virtual asset operations with providers that are not authorized to operate in the country as counterparties, except in the cases provided for in the rule itself.

Translating from regulatory language into everyday English: operating in the Brazilian market without dealing with the institutional system will become considerably harder.

But is regulation against the idea of Bitcoin?

This is where it gets really interesting.

For an important current in the crypto world, the answer tends to be yes.

Bitcoin emerged precisely in an environment of deep distrust toward financial institutions. Its architecture allows value to be transferred and held without necessarily depending on a bank, a broker or a central monetary authority.

That feature still exists.

No resolution from Brazil's Central Bank changes the Bitcoin protocol.

No bureaucrat in Brasília needs to authorize a block.

And nobody needs to ask the Brazilian State for permission to generate a private key.

This matters because two different things are often lumped together: regulating intermediaries does not mean regulating the Bitcoin protocol.

The Central Bank is regulating companies that offer services involving virtual assets, such as custody, intermediation, trading and other activities provided for in the rules.

And there is an important political difference there.

It is one thing for a decentralized network to run without asking permission.

It is quite another for a private company to hold the assets of thousands or millions of people and argue that, because it uses a decentralized technology, it should be free of responsibilities equivalent to those of other financial intermediaries.

Blockchain does not automatically turn a company into a public good.

“Decentralized” cannot work as a magic word that ends any discussion about power, accountability or user protection.

The question the left should be asking

For a long time, the political debate on cryptocurrencies was stuck in an unproductive dichotomy.

On one side: “the State must control it.”

On the other: “the State must get out of the way.”

Maybe the relevant question is a different one: who needs to be protected from whom?

If someone keeps Bitcoin in self-custody, they are exercising a radical form of financial autonomy. It is hard to ignore the political importance of that possibility.

But when that same person hands their assets to a centralized company, the relationship changes.

There is an intermediary again. There is information asymmetry. There is operational risk. There is fraud risk. There is insolvency risk. There is someone holding the key.

And the recent history of the crypto market itself has shown, sometimes brutally, that writing “crypto” on a company's storefront eliminates none of these problems.

This is exactly where a progressive reading of regulation can contribute to the debate.

It is not about defending a State that controls every transaction, every wallet or every innovation.

Nor about accepting any regulation simply because it came from a public authority.

Bad regulation exists. It can create excessive barriers to entry, favor large economic groups, smother smaller companies, concentrate markets and even preserve the very intermediaries that decentralized technologies could challenge.

So the issue is not regulation or freedom.

It is figuring out which regulation preserves freedom without turning vulnerability into a business model.

There is a paradox here

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of this new stage in Brazil is the list of interested companies.

When traditional banks, large international exchanges, blockchain companies and B3 itself move to stay in the regulated digital asset market, it becomes hard to keep treating crypto as a peripheral economic experiment.

The sector has grown. And growth has consequences.

The small libertarian lab of the internet became an industry. The industry became a market. The market moves the savings of ordinary people.

And when millions of people adopt a technology, the questions stop being merely technical. They become political.

• Who oversees it?
• Who answers when something goes wrong?
• How do you stop money laundering without destroying privacy?
• How do you protect consumers without making self-custody unviable?
• How do you keep rules designed to increase safety from handing the whole market to a handful of conglomerates?
• How do you allow innovation without repeating, with a prettier interface and a few English buzzwords, the same concentration problems we already know from the financial system?

These questions have no simple answers.

Thankfully.

Maybe the crypto debate is finally growing up enough to let go of simple answers.

Regulation is also a struggle over power

There is one more point that deserves attention in the coming months.

The more expensive and complex the regulatory requirements are, the greater the advantage may be for institutions with giant legal departments, compliance teams and enough capital to absorb those costs.

A rule created to protect the market can, if poorly calibrated, help concentrate it.

That is not an argument against regulation.

It is an argument for scrutinizing regulation itself too.

A progressive agenda for digital assets should be able to defend, at the same time, consumer protection, the fight against financial crime, competition, privacy, innovation, self-custody and room for smaller companies.

It sounds contradictory.

Public policy almost always is.

The democratic challenge lies precisely in managing these tensions without pretending they don't exist.

Brazil chose to join the discussion

It is too early to know which companies will receive final authorization, how the market will reorganize, or whether the new requirements will bring more safety without excessive concentration.

But one change has already happened.

The Brazilian State is no longer watching the crypto phenomenon mostly from the stands.

And the market, for its part, is discovering that reaching enough scale to compete with the financial system also means entering the territory of public responsibilities.

That may frustrate those who dreamed of a world where code would completely replace institutions.

But it also opens a more mature possibility.

Decentralized technology does not need permission to exist.

Companies that profit from intermediating people, however, can and should be called to answer for the power they wield.

The challenge now is to make sure that, in setting rules for this market, Brazil does not kill precisely what was most interesting about it: the possibility of expanding autonomy, competition and innovation.

Regulating should not mean putting a leash on technology. It should mean setting limits for those who hold power over others.

And that difference, small as it may seem, may be one of the most important political discussions of the new digital economy.