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In the world · Finance · 4 November 2025

Drex: Brazil's Central Bank shifts course to collateral

Brazil's Central Bank shut down the Drex pilot platform and refocused the project on reconciling liens. What changes for credit and agribusiness.

bairogonzalez.com team, drawing on Bairo's story · Published

Drex, the Central Bank of Brazil's project for a digital asset infrastructure, changed course between 2025 and 2026. After two pilot phases on a distributed ledger platform, the Central Bank announced in November 2025 that it would shut down that platform and that the project's first deliverable would be simpler: a centralized solution to reconcile liens (gravames), the records of assets pledged as collateral for loans.

What happened

The Drex pilot began in 2023, with banks, cooperatives and technology companies testing operations with tokenized assets on a network based on Hyperledger Besu, a permissioned blockchain technology. The first phase tested basic operations, such as buying and selling tokenized federal government bonds, and ended with a public report from the Central Bank. The second phase, completed in the first half of 2025, tested use cases proposed by the market.

The central challenge appeared early: reconciling the transparency of a distributed ledger with banking secrecy and personal data protection. In August 2025, the Central Bank signaled that Drex's first deliverable would set aside blockchain and tokenization and focus on lien reconciliation. On November 4, 2025, it announced that it would shut down the pilot platform.

Central Bank Governor Gabriel Galípolo explained to Exame that, after four years, the technology tested "did not prove viable," and that today there are other ways to reach a network of tokenized assets with security and liquidity. He also made clear that the project has not ended and that Drex is not a central bank digital currency in the traditional sense.

Why it matters

A lien is the legal mark that says an asset is already committed: the car under fiduciary lien, the mortgaged property, the financed machine. Today, finding out whether an asset is free to serve as collateral requires consulting different registries, in different places. This slows credit and makes it more expensive for borrowers.

For agribusiness, the subject is central. Tractors, combines, future harvests and land are the typical collateral for rural credit. If the financial system can see, quickly and reliably, what is already committed and what is free, growers can access credit with less paperwork and less waiting.

The change also teaches something about technology. The Central Bank did not abandon the idea of tokenized assets. It chose to first solve a concrete problem with the tool that works today. It is a lesson in institutional humility: purpose comes before technology.

In Bairo's view

Bairo Leandro Gonzalez Martinez often says that sales data can be the collateral the small grower never had. In his reading, Drex's new direction points the same way: the credit of the future depends less on whom you know and more on what you can prove.

For Bairo, the most important point of the Central Bank's decision is the order of things. First, prove that a record is reliable. Then, build what comes on top of it. It is the same order he advocates for the infrastructure that connects agribusiness to the world: prices with a source, recorded sales, verifiable history, and only then credit.

He measures everything in lifetime. A credit application that takes weeks to check collateral consumes the time of those who farm. In his view, every record that spares a trip to the registry office gives hours back to someone, and that is why this kind of infrastructure deserves attention, even when it looks like mere backstage work.

Where this meets the ecosystem

CEASA Bank, an agribusiness financial platform founded by Bairo that operates on the infrastructure of an authorized institution, includes in its design harvest-linked credit and the recording of every sale as financial history belonging to the seller. The proposal is for this history to help open up credit, always through an institution authorized to grant it.

The BTZ Chain takes a different path from the one chosen by the Central Bank: it is a public network, in which anyone can check blocks and transactions in the explorer. The two choices do not compete. Drex deals with the regulated infrastructure of the national financial system; the BTZ Chain proposes to record verifiable facts of the ecosystem, with proof that there is a real person behind each act. BICOIN, this network's governance coin, follows the yardstick "1 BTZ = 1 minute of human life", which is purpose and not price.

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