The official H1 scoreboard is now on the Banco Central do Brasil books. Valor Econômico, quoting the July 28 external-sector statistics briefing, put resident purchases of virtual assets at $14.68 billion from January through June, 135% above the $6.24 billion printed in the same half of 2025. Fernando Rocha, head of the BCB’s Statistics Department, told Valor that roughly 90% to 95% of the demand the bank can identify is for stablecoins.
What the $14.68 billion actually counts
This is a balance-of-payments line, not an exchange volume ticker. The BCB is measuring purchases by Brazilian residents through firms that trade virtual assets, and only for tokens with an identifiable issuer. In the Time Series Management System the matching monthly series is SGS 29644. The raw prints are negative because a purchase is a debit (money leaving the country to buy the asset). Flip the sign and the first six months of 2026 sum to $14.680 billion, which is the Valor total.
Add the same six months of 2025 and you get $6.235 billion, which rounds to Valor’s $6.24 billion. June 2026 is $2.542 billion against June 2025’s $1.476 billion. May 2026 is $2.632 billion, the same May stablecoin figure Bitcoin.com carried from the prior monthly cut.
Two things sit outside the line. Peer-to-peer tickets and coins sitting in a wallet you hold yourself do not have to pass a registered intermediary, so they need not appear. Rocha also told Valor the bank can see the source of the funds in FX contracts and still cannot see the use (payment, remittance, treasury, speculation) inside the balance of payments. “Starting next year, we will have a more complete picture,” he said.
The monthly climb, not a one-month spike
SGS 29644 is a staircase, not a single jump. The monthly debit bottomed near $773 million in March 2025, crossed $2 billion in November, and peaked at $2.709 billion in April 2026. May and June cooled only a little, to $2.632 billion and $2.542 billion. Split the half: Q1 2026 sums to about $6.80 billion, Q2 to about $7.88 billion. The second quarter ran hotter than the first on the same official tape.
Monthly resident crypto purchases in Brazil, January 2025 through June 2026, from Banco Central do Brasil SGS series 29644 (USD millions, sign flipped so a purchase reads as a positive). The first-half 2026 months sum to $14.68 billion.
Rocha’s mix comment is the other half of the print. A few years ago the identified demand sat in bitcoin and other volatile coins. It now sits in tokens pegged to the dollar (and, he said, to the real), used “primarily… as a means of payment and for other forms of transaction settlement.” Valor International carries the same cut. Read it as a dollar-rail print. The bitcoin bid, if one is forming, lives on another tape.
Sunday’s BTC/USDT tape on Crypto.com Exchange is a different instrument. Friday settled $63,048.33. Saturday settled $63,088.74. As of about 09:34 UTC on August 16 the pair last traded near $63,066, still an intraday mark on a forming daily candle. U.S. spot Bitcoin ETFs do not create or redeem over the weekend; the last Farside line remains Friday’s −$56.2 million. None of that rewrites the Brazilian H1 debit.
Demand grew while the pipes got tighter
The same half-year that produced this purchase line is the half-year in which the BCB kept tightening the intermediaries that generate it. Resolução BCB nº 520 still points incumbents at the 30 October 2026 authorization filing date. Resolução BCB nº 584 puts a 24-hour hold on large virtual-asset transfers abroad or to self-custody from January 2027. Resolução BCB nº 580 parks sociedades prestadoras de serviços de ativos virtuais (SPSAVs) in Tipo 3 prudential supervision from the same January date, which is also when Rocha expects the destination of these flows to become visible.
A reader who holds USDT or USDC in a wallet they control is not in SGS 29644 unless the coins arrived through a reporting intermediary. The official demand print is the on-ramp the central bank can see. The coins that have already left for self-custody are a separate stock.
The number that is now on the board
Until the next external-sector cut (July’s series is due from the BCB in late August), the fixed facts are these: $14.68 billion of identified resident purchases in H1 2026, 135% above H1 2025, 90–95% stablecoins on Rocha’s read, and a monthly series that spent the whole second quarter above $2.5 billion. The print describes how Brazilians bought dollar-linked tokens through supervised pipes. It is not a forecast of July, and it is not financial advice.
