Crypto exchanges operating in Brazil are up against a key Friday deadline: firms already active in the country must file for authorization if they want to continue operating while regulators review their applications. Even then, the deadline only opens a much longer compliance process, with costs rising and several regulatory questions still unresolved.
“Filing is the easy part,” Fabio Cendão, founding partner at Brazilian law firm FCM Law, told Cointelegraph. He pointed to high capital requirements, complex compliance obligations and recurring audits as the harder part of the process.
Brazil introduced its crypto regulatory framework in November 2025, placing exchanges, custodians and other virtual asset service providers under the supervision of the Banco Central do Brasil, or BCB.
According to Chainalysis, Brazil recorded $252.5 billion in crypto activity between July 2025 and June 2026, making it the world’s top country for grassroots crypto adoption.
What comes after the filing deadline
Cendão said platforms that submit their applications on time can keep operating while regulators examine the filings. That review can take as long as two years.
New entrants, by contrast, must secure authorization before launching regulated services in the country.
Marcelo de Castro Cunha Filho, a lawyer at Machado Meyer, said companies that miss the deadline must stop providing services within 30 days from Friday. Starting Nov. 6, banks and payment institutions will also face restrictions on carrying out crypto transactions with providers that are not authorized.
Key parts of the rules are still unclear
Under the new framework, crypto service providers must verify the origin and destination of crypto transfers, including transfers involving self-custodial wallets. The rules also set a $100,000 cap on certain international crypto transfers when the counterparty is not authorized to operate in Brazil’s foreign exchange market.
Thiago Sarandy, general manager of Binance Brazil, told Cointelegraph that exchanges still do not know how they are expected to identify self-custody wallets, how the $100,000 operational limit should be interpreted, or how to determine minimum transaction-reporting thresholds.
“The lack of clarity creates a risky situation,” Sarandy said. He warned that exchanges may end up reporting fragmented or inconsistent data to regulators, which “puts in jeopardy the oversight capacity.”
Sarandy added that industry association ABCripto had submitted questions to the BCB and had not yet received answers.
Smaller exchanges face the biggest strain
Several large global exchanges have already filed, including OKX, Binance and Coinbase. At the same time, Latin American crypto exchange Bitso is ending direct retail services in Brazil through a partnership with local exchange Mercado Bitcoin.
Smaller operators face a tougher path. Cendão said minimum capital requirements range from 10.8 million Brazilian reais to 37.2 million reais, depending on the services offered. On top of that, firms must deal with technical certification, custody audits and anti-money laundering controls.
He said those costs could make compliance unworkable for smaller exchanges and could increase market concentration.
Cunha Filho also said it remains unclear how exchanges that miss the deadline should return crypto to customers who do not have accounts with authorized providers or who have not agreed to transfer their assets.
The BCB had not responded to Cointelegraph’s request for comment by the time of publication.
