Aerial view of the Central Bank of Brazil building in Brasília, taken on August 21, 2025. World Architecture Day is celebrated annually on the first Monday of October. The Central Bank of Brazil headquarters building, designed by architect Hélio Ferreira Pinto, was inaugurated in 1981 and is a landmark of the city’s architecture, with a shape inspired by the cross design found on coins from the Portuguese Empire, known as the “Dobrão”. (Photo by Evaristo Sa / AFP) (Photo by EVARISTO SA/AFP via Getty Images)
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One of global finance’s most reliable trades has always come with a catch: you had to be an institution to play.
For decades, macro funds and sophisticated foreign investors have quietly poured money into Brazilian government bonds, drawn by interest rates, currently 14.5%, that rank among the highest of any major economy in the world.
“A person who held dollars ten years ago and traded all their dollars for Brazilian reais, and then kept those reais – earning only the risk-free interest rate – would actually have more dollar value at the end of that period than somebody who just held dollars the whole time,” said John Delaney, CEO and co-founder of Crown, a São Paulo-based stablecoin issuer, during a recent interview on the Brazil Crypto Report podcast.
According to analysis by Atlantico, a Brazilian investment firm, $100 invested at Brazil’s benchmark rate in 2010 would have grown to $124 in dollar-adjusted terms by 2025, slightly outpacing the $122 return from the equivalent U.S. Treasury instrument even after accounting for the real’s steep decline vis-a-vis the dollar over that period.
Compounded currency values across Brazil, Mexico, United States from 2010-2025
Atlantico
Non-residents held roughly R$879 billion, approximately US$155 billion, in Brazilian government bonds as of April 2026, according to the Brazilian Finance Ministry’s most recent monthly debt report.
These holdings equate to roughly 10% of Brazil’s outstanding government bonds, with more than 70% of that concentrated in fixed-rate instruments.
While the economics of the BRL carry trade are compelling, the friction has kept most investors out. Accessing it requires navigating a bureaucratic gauntlet: a special non-resident bank account, various agents and intermediaries who execute trades and interface with Brazilian authorities on your behalf, and a setup process that can take months and be difficult to unwind.
The BRL Carry Trade, Unlocked
Stablecoins are changing the calculus. A new generation of infrastructure built around Brazilian real-denominated digital assets is attempting to strip out that bureaucratic layer entirely, making what has historically been an institutional-only trade accessible to a broader pool of capital.
“Macro funds on Wall Street love the BRL carry trade,” said Jack Chong, CEO and co-founder of Checker, a stablecoin liquidity network operating across Latin America and globally, in an interview. “Maybe crypto-natives are going to love it too.”
Chong’s company provides the rails. Checker operates a two-sided network connecting banks, payments companies and neobanks to global stablecoin liquidity. The company processed more than $3 billion in payments in its first year of operation and estimates it now handles roughly 1% of global stablecoin business-to-business payment volume.
Moving money into Brazil and other markets efficiently, across the right currency pairs and within a compliant framework, is the exact problem Checker aims to solve.
On the other side sits the instrument itself. Crown, backed by a $13.5 million Series A led by crypto venture firm Paradigm, issues BRLV, a stablecoin denominated in Brazilian reais and backed entirely by Brazilian government bonds.
Unlike most stablecoins, where the issuer captures the interest generated by reserve assets, Crown distributes that yield to institutional partners at what Delaney describes as the “architectural” level.
The Two Halves
Delaney frames the opportunity in terms that carry traders will recognize immediately, but that most retail investors have never encountered.
“It’s almost like the interest rate is half of the money,” he explained. “You have the actual fiat currency that depreciates, but then you have this interest rate. When you couple them together, that makes the money better.”
Blockchains, he argues, are the first technology capable of binding those two halves into a single instrument. Before, accessing the yield required the full apparatus of a traditional financial institution. With BRLV, Delaney says execution is reduced to a single click, with 24-hour liquidity and a fraction of the setup time.
David Taylor, CEO and co-founder of Etherfuse, which tokenizes sovereign debt across Latin America, sees the same dynamic at work. “Our assets have all the utility of fiat currency or a stablecoin, but they’re an interest-bearing bond,” Taylor said during a podcast interview:
“The blockchain quite literally makes sovereign debt better than it can be in the traditional space.”
Crown has already attracted a notable early roster of institutional holders. Atmos Capital, a Rio de Janeiro-based long-only equity fund, has taken a position in the stablecoin within its regulated fund. Citrino Gestao, the family office behind the Votorantim industrial conglomerate, has also subscribed.
Economist and former Brazilian Central Bank director André Lara Resende is advising the project. He is credited with designing the 1994 Real Plan, which successfully tamed the country’s hyperinflation.
Timing the Wave
The regulatory conditions for scaling this trade are falling into place on two continents. Brazil’s Virtual Asset Service Provider framework goes fully live in Q4 2026, creating clearer rails for institutional stablecoin products in the country.
In the US, the GENIUS Act has brought stablecoin issuers into existing regulatory frameworks, opening the door for traditional financial institutions to participate in the market for the first time.
Delaney’s ambition is considerable. Crown is targeting one trillion reais in BRLV in circulation within 10 years, which represents 13% of Brazil’s current M2 money supply. He sees it as a “winner-take-most” market, and positions BRLV explicitly as what Tether and Circle are to US Treasury bonds, only for Brazilian government debt.
“The net effect,” Delaney said, “is that Brazil will be able to export its interest rate a lot more.”