The cryptocurrency market moved €47.05bn in Brazil in the first half of 2026, according to updated data from Brazil's federal tax authority, the Receita Federal, the highest figure for the first six months of a year since the historical series began in 2019. The total includes operations declared by exchanges in the country, use of exchanges abroad, and transactions carried out without an exchange as intermediary.
The volume represents a gain of 21.3% compared with the same period of 2025, when operations totalled €38.77bn, and an increase of 49.4% over the first half of 2024, when the total was €31.48bn. The data also show that the first six months of 2026 account for 55.5% of the entire volume declared in 2025, which stood at €84.78bn.
The busiest month of the half-year was May, with €9.66bn in declared operations. June followed closely, with €9.56bn. The two months together accounted for more than 40% of the half-year's total volume, pointing to strong acceleration towards the end of the period. In January, by comparison, the total had been €6.80bn.
Brazilian exchanges remained the main channel for operations. They accounted for €29.52bn in the first half, or 62.8% of the total. Transactions without exchanges totalled €10.92bn, while operations through exchanges abroad reached €6.60bn.
Read also: The 10 most traded cryptocurrencies in Brazil
The strongest growth, however, came from operations carried out without exchanges. This group moved €10.92bn in the first half of 2026, a gain of around 50% over the €7.26bn recorded in the same period of 2025. At Brazilian exchanges, growth was 13%, while operations through foreign exchanges rose 22.3%.
Stablecoins dominate the market
The breakdown by crypto asset shows that the Brazilian market remains increasingly concentrated in stablecoins. Among buy and sell operations of the main crypto assets listed by the tax authority, USDT, issued by Tether, led by a wide margin, with €33.16bn traded in the first half of 2026. That figure represents 76.5% of the combined volume in this table.
In second place is USDC, issued by Circle, with €6.37bn in operations during the half-year. Together, the two stablecoins totalled €39.53bn, or around 91% of the buy-and-sell volume of the main crypto assets reported. The tax authority notes that this breakdown considers only buy and sell operations of the main crypto assets currently on the market and that the figures are expressed in reais in the original data.
Bitcoin came third, with €2.19bn traded from January to June. Despite remaining the leading crypto asset by global market value, BTC lagged well behind the stablecoins in the flow declared to the tax authority. It was followed by Ethereum, with €0.58bn, BRZ, with around €0.35bn, Solana, with €0.24bn, and XRP, with approximately €152 million.
The dominance of stablecoins is also evident month by month. In the case of USDT, volume jumped from €4.81bn in January to €7.48bn in May, the asset's highest mark of the half-year. USDC also accelerated during the period, reaching €2.34bn in June, its highest monthly volume of the half-year.
More than 4 million taxpayer IDs a month
The tax authority's data also show that the market continues to have a broad base of participants. In every month of the first half of 2026, more than 4 million unique individual taxpayer IDs (CPF, Brazil's equivalent of a national tax number) appeared in filings. The peak was in April, with 5.08 million CPFs, while the highest number of corporate taxpayer IDs (CNPJ) was recorded in May, with 116,400 companies.
The tax authority notes that the CPF and CNPJ figures count unique occurrences in each month, without repetition within that monthly period, regardless of how many transactions each taxpayer carried out. For this reason, the figures should not be added together to produce a half-year total of unique users.
The first-half picture reinforces two trends in the Brazilian crypto asset market. The first is the growth in volume declared to the tax authority, which reached a new high in 2026. The second is the consolidation of stablecoins as the main driver of operations, with USDT and USDC accounting for nearly all of the buy-and-sell volume of the main crypto assets listed in the report.
In practice, the data show that the Brazilian crypto market no longer revolves solely around directional bets on Bitcoin, Ethereum or other cryptocurrencies. Most of the declared flow is linked to digital assets pegged to the dollar, used as a means of liquidity, currency hedging, payments and movement between platforms.
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