The volume of money remittances for purchasing cryptocurrencies once again broke a record in October, according to recent data released by the Central Bank. According to the note from the external sector, US$15.02 billion left the country in the first ten months of the year, already surpassing the result seen in the whole of last year, which was US$12.31 billion.
In October alone, Brazilian spending on cryptocurrencies was US$1.22 billion, compared to US$1.05 billion in the same period in 2023. Inflows of resources related to operations with digital currencies, which tend to be very low , were US$78 million last month, compared to US$55 million in the same period of 2023. Thus, the accumulated amount from 2024 to date has reached US$949 million, also above the US$ 613 million exported last year.
For the Central Bank, the purchase of cryptocurrencies is counted as dollar remittances because most of the “exchanges” – the trading exchanges for these digital currencies – are located abroad. Therefore, the investor sends money outside the country when investing in these assets. Likewise, cryptocurrency sales operations are counted as dollar inflows into the country.
READ MORE: BC alert: remittances of cryptos and bets already exceed Brazilian spending abroad
The net result of the cryptoactive account totaled a deficit of US$ 1.14 billion in October, reaching US$ 14.07 billion in the year to date. In 2023, the country recorded a deficit of US$11.69 billion in the segment.
Stablecoins are the most traded by Brazilians
In the same vein, Brazil broke another record: the volume of transactions with cryptocurrencies declared to the Federal Revenue Service. There were R$363.27 billion in the year up to the end of September, an increase of 82% over the R$199.60 billion recorded in the same period in 2023.
September’s data, the latest available, was also historic: R$115.76 billion, an increase of 306% compared to August, when the volume was R$28.46 billion, and the highest result since the data began to be published. be accounted for by the Revenue in August 2019.
And something common that has been reinforced in recent numbers is the dominance of operations carried out with stablecoinscryptocurrencies backed by some other asset, the most common being the dollar. These digital currencies are widely used for cross-border transactions in dollars, as they have the same value as American currency, but have less bureaucracy and transaction fees, making transfers faster.
The most used by investors is, by far, Tether (UDST), with R$16.6 billion in operations with the currency declared in September alone. The second largest stablecoin on the market, Circle’s USDC, had a volume of R$1.3 billion.
The volume with Tether is more than five times that recorded with the largest cryptocurrency in the world, Bitcoin (BTC), which traded R$3.1 billion in September. Ethereum (ETH), in turn, recorded a volume of R$884.8 million in the same month.
Two other stablecoins also draw attention to the most traded list. BUSD, issued by Paxos, which is also backed by the dollar, recorded R$449.5 million in transactions, while BRZ, a stablecoin backed by the real, recorded R$316.1 million.
According to the open data report on cryptoassets, the monthly result was driven by the strong volume of operations without the use of exchanges, which reached R$97.15 billion in September, while operations using brokers totaled R$2.66 billion. The other R$15.9 billion came from the exchanges themselves.
Despite this strong increase, the number of CPFs and CNPJs that declared having carried out transactions with cryptocurrencies fell, a trend seen since the beginning of this year. In January, there were 8.9 million CPFs and 403.2 thousand CNPJs, numbers that fell to 4.4 million and 16.5 thousand, respectively.
The IRS spent more than a year without publishing open data on cryptoactive declarations, having suspended disclosure before the August 2023 data and only resuming it last month.
