Brazil's central bank will bar stablecoins from settling one specific type of international payment flow starting Oct. 1, closing a shortcut that let foreign-exchange providers bundle payments and settle abroad with virtual assets. Individual cross-border transfers using stablecoins stay permitted, but a lawyer close to the rule warns the change could push flows back onto costlier bank rails.
Resolution 561 closes a settlement gap
Brazil's central bank issued Resolution 561, which targets the settlement leg between regulated FX providers and their overseas counterparties. Starting Oct. 1, that leg must run through a licensed FX transaction or a qualifying non-resident real account, instead of stablecoins or other virtual assets.
Providers can still net and consolidate many individual payments before settling once with a foreign counterparty. What disappears is only the combination of that bulk aggregation with stablecoin settlement — the eFX model itself remains intact, and individual international transfers using virtual assets remain permitted under Brazil's existing framework.
Oscar Guillermo Farah Osorio, founding partner at Zanella & Farah, told CryptoSlate the rule resolves an ambiguity left open since Brazil's 2022 virtual assets law gave the central bank authority over which crypto operations count as foreign-exchange activity, without specific rules ever following. He said the resolution gives the central bank clearer visibility into flows it previously could not fully see within the formal exchange system.
The cost of losing the shortcut
Farah argued that the stablecoin-and-bulk-aggregation combination is where much of the cost advantage lived. Losing it could mean absorbing Brazil's financial transaction tax on conventional FX conversions, plus correspondent-bank and SWIFT-network fees that stablecoin settlement previously avoided — costs Farah expects will eventually land on Brazilian consumers and businesses.
Brazil's tax authority 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. Stablecoins accounted for close to 80% of declared crypto volume in 2025 alone, and USDT made up nearly 89% of that stablecoin total.
A July Bank of Italy study tested 200-dollar USDC transfers across ten international corridors, including Brazil, and found total costs ranging from 0.3% to nearly 9%, with no consistent advantage over conventional payment channels. The blockchain transfer itself accounted for only a marginal share of total cost, while currency conversion and local payment infrastructure drove most of the expense. The Financial Stability Board reached a similar conclusion in July.
Brokers shift focus to internal infrastructure
Cregis CEO Shawn Yan said the more consequential shift is happening inside brokers' own infrastructure, where stablecoins already handle treasury management, liquidity movement between entities and internal settlement invisible to the end client. He said:
According to CryptoSlate: "You can't build the model around one assumption about how stablecoins will be treated everywhere."
Farah also questioned why individual international stablecoin transfers stay permitted while the aggregated eFX version does not, since regulated providers could plausibly supply the same transaction data either way. He reads the rule mainly as an effort to keep flows inside channels the central bank can already see, short of a conceptual break in how regulators treat stablecoins.
The bull case has Brazil's explicit boundary reducing legal uncertainty as larger firms build compliance workflows around it. The bear case is that the required settlement path adds enough FX, banking and correspondent costs that stablecoins lose much of their advantage for Brazil-linked flows specifically, leaving smaller payment firms to weigh whether building separate architecture for one market is worth it.
Source: CryptoSlate
Trading involves risk.
Risk Disclaimer
