Second edition of the series built exclusively on Receita Federal open data (Aug/2019 to Jun/2026, updated 26 Aug 2026) — a dataset few countries in the world publish. 2025 closed as the largest year on record, R$510bn in declared buy-and-sell across all channels, and the first half of 2026 has already added R$283bn in six months: a ~R$566bn/year run-rate, up 21.3% on H1 2025. What changed is not the size but the composition. Stablecoins are now 92% of volume, peaking at 95.9% in May; Bitcoin, which was 80.8% of the market in 2019, is down to 5.1%. Three structural vectors run underneath: a retail base stabilised in the millions of monthly filers, a growing share of volume leaving Brazilian exchanges, and extreme concentration in a handful of dollar-pegged assets. Together they explain the urgency of DeCripto, whose monthly reporting took effect on 1 July 2026.
The biggest year on record — and a first half that beat its own pace
The annual curve reads as one long climb: R$28.7bn in 2019, R$215.4bn in 2021, R$285bn in 2023, R$416.1bn in 2024 and R$510.1bn in 2025. H1 2026 alone is R$283.1bn across 53.4 million operations, and the half was not flat — after four steady months around R$41bn, volume surged to R$58.1bn in May and R$57.5bn in June, the two biggest months on record. Those two months alone are ~41% of the entire first half, a signature of larger tickets and of stablecoins being used to move value rather than to trade.
The stablecoin share tells the structural story. It went from 3.5% in 2019 to a 91.5% peak in 2023, dipped to 75.7% in 2024 as Bitcoin's rally pulled volume back, then recovered to 80.2% in 2025 and reached 92% in H1 2026 — confirming 2024 as an exception rather than an inflection. Underneath it, the filer base grew 34-fold in six years, from 134k individuals per month in 2019 to ~4.6mn since 2023, the turning point being the moment domestic exchanges began reporting with no value threshold.
Nearly nine of every ten reais in stablecoins are USDT
Concentration inside the stablecoin universe is sharper than in the market as a whole. In 2025, USDT alone traded R$326.9bn — 72% of all declared volume — against R$48bn for Bitcoin (10.6%) and R$33bn for USDC (7.3%); just five assets hold ~95% of the total. In H1 2026 the pecking order moved: USDT slipped from 89.7% to 83.1% of stablecoins while USDC jumped from 9.1% to 16%, a +314.5% year-on-year gain worth R$38bn and the single largest move of the half. Among real-pegged issuances, BRZ is the only one with relevant volume in the dataset.
The mirror image is a broad retreat in volatile assets. Comparing H1 2026 with H1 2025, Bitcoin fell 45.8% (R$24.4bn to R$13.2bn), Ethereum 53.2%, Solana 65.6% and XRP 74.3%. The market grew 21.3% and every traditional crypto shrank — meaning the entire increment came from stablecoins. What the data describes is less a speculative market than a de facto digital dollar: a store and a rail for transferring value.
Where the volume goes — and why Receita rewrote the rules
By venue, H1 2026 splits into 62.8% on Brazilian exchanges, 14.0% on foreign brokers and 23.2% with no exchange at all — P2P and self-custody. That last channel went from R$44bn to R$66bn in a year (+50.4%), and together the two non-domestic routes are 37.2% of volume, up from 32.6% in H1 2025. This is precisely the flow DeCripto (IN RFB No. 2,291/2025) is built to capture, aligned with the OECD's CARF standard, with monthly reporting in force since 1 July 2026. Separately, the Central Bank pushed the start of FX reporting for virtual-asset operations to 3 November 2026 (Resolution BCB No. 574/2026).
The participant profile carries a structural contrast: by value, legal entities — mostly exchanges filing on their own behalf — account for about 98% of volume, while by number of filers the millions of individuals vastly outnumber companies. Companies themselves grew 52.8% in the half, from 70k filers in January to 107k in June, and the female share of value rose from 13.4% to 15.7% (17.5% at the April peak). Two caveats belong with the numbers: absolute figures consolidate taxpayer declarations and may include filing errors, so trends and trajectories are the reliable read — and, just past the window this edition covers, crypto-asset demand measured by the Central Bank fell 58.4% year-on-year in July 2026, a change of pace the next edition will have to price in.
Key findings
- Record volume. R$510bn declared in 2025, up from R$416bn in 2024 — the highest mark on record. H1 2026 already totals R$283bn, a ~R$566bn/year run-rate and +21.3% on H1 2025.
- Stablecoins dominate. 80.2% of volume in 2025 and 92% in H1 2026, with a monthly record of 95.9% in May. Bitcoin fell from 80.8% of the market in 2019 to 5.1% in the half.
- A massive retail base. 4.6 million individuals filing per month against 134k in 2019 — a 34× jump in six years — holding at ~4.5mn/month in 2026, with an April peak of 5.08mn CPFs.
- Flight from domestic exchanges. 37.2% of H1 2026 volume happens outside Brazilian brokers, up from 32.6% a year earlier; the no-exchange channel alone went from R$44bn to R$66bn (+50.4%) and is now 23.2% of the total.
- Extreme concentration. Five assets hold ~95% of volume. USDT is 83.1% of stablecoins in 2026, down from 89.7%, with USDC jumping from 9.1% to 16% (+314.5% year-on-year) — the main reshuffle inside the digital dollar.