The number doesn’t include international exchanges because they aren’t required to tell the Brazil local tax office about them.
The South American country’s tax agency, Receita Federal, said this week that Brazil had more than 1 million registered crypto users in July. This was the first time that number had been reached.
According to Receita Federal, 1.33 million Brazilians bought crypto in July, which is 68% more than in June.
Only crypto purchases made on Brazilian exchanges were included in the report. This is because foreign platforms are not required to follow local regulation 1888, which in 2019 said that crypto companies had to report the transactions of Brazilian users to the government.
The Brazilian Congress is currently thinking about a crypto bill that would require foreign exchanges to have an Employer Identification Number (EIN) in order to apply for a local license. This would force them to report transactions, too.
The Brazilian tax office also included reports from individual investors and businesses, which are both required to report monthly amounts of more than 30,000 Brazilian reais ($5,740).
According to a survey by the Brazilian Association of Financial and Capital Market Entities (Anbima), more than 4.2 million people in the country, or 2% of the population, invested in cryptocurrencies in June.
July’s growth happened around the same time that Nubank, the country’s largest digital bank by market value, started using cryptocurrencies. In July, Nubank announced that it had reached 1 million crypto users since starting its crypto platform in May.
Receita Federal said that Brazilians traded 13.7 billion reais worth of cryptocurrency in July, which was 11% less than in June and 28% less than in May.