Brazil's Pix Hit 80 Billion Payments in 2025. Why Drex Changed Course

In São Paulo, the man selling coconut water on the beach has a laminated QR code taped to his cart. So does the dentist, the landlord and the city's parking app. Brazil's Pix went from launch in November 2020 to the default way most Brazilians pay in about four years. In the same period, Brazil's more ambitious digital currency project, Drex, tested blockchain for bank settlement and then dropped it. The contrast is one of the most useful case studies in payments.

Pix by the numbers

The Banco Central do Brasil's second Pix management report, published in August 2026 and covered by Diario de Pernambuco, put 2025 volume at nearly 80 billion transactions worth more than R$35 trillion, with value up 33.8% on the year. That follows 9.4 billion in 2021, 24 billion in 2022, 42 billion in 2023 and 63.4 billion in 2024, according to central bank data compiled by Payments CMI.

The pace has not slowed. In the first five months of 2026, Pix handled 36.3 billion transactions worth R$16 trillion, averaging close to 3,000 transactions a second, Sou Brasília reported. On a single day in June 2025, Pix processed nearly 280 million payments.

From transfers to shopping

The more telling statistic is who uses Pix for what. In 2020, person-to-person transfers made up 85% of transactions. By 2025, 43% of all Pix transactions went from individuals to businesses, according to the central bank report. Pix stopped being a way to split dinner bills and became the way Brazilians pay shops.

By February 2025, 165 million individuals and 19.2 million businesses were registered. For comparison, Brazil had about 163 million adults in 2024. Pix effectively reached everyone with a phone and a bank account, including millions who never got a credit card.

Why Pix worked

• The central bank built and ran it. Large institutions were required to join, so coverage was universal from day one.
• It was free for individuals. No fee for a person sending money removed the main reason to stick with cash.
• Keys instead of account numbers. A phone number, email or tax ID is enough to receive money.
• It keeps adding features. Contactless Pix through phone wallets arrived in February 2025, and Pix Automático, for recurring bills authorised by the customer, launched in June 2025. That last one goes straight at direct debit and card subscriptions.

The lesson for other countries is that the rail itself was not novel. Instant payments already existed elsewhere. What was new was a public operator with the authority to make everyone join and the willingness to make it free. India's UPI followed a similar logic, which we explore in UPI's global expansion.

Brazil did not need a new kind of money. It needed a free, universal way to move the money it already had.

Bills are next

Pix Automático deserves more attention than it gets outside Brazil. Before it, a gym, a school or a streaming service that wanted recurring payments had two main options: a credit card on file or a bank direct debit, which typically required the customer and the business to bank at the same institution. Millions of Brazilians without credit cards were left paying monthly bills by hand, often with a boleto, a printed or digital payment slip.

With Pix Automático, the customer authorises a business once inside their own banking app, sets a limit if they want, and the charge arrives each month without further work. For a family in Recife paying school fees, an internet bill and a phone plan, that is three fewer things to remember. For the businesses, it means fewer late payments and lower costs than card acceptance. We think recurring bills are where instant rails can make the most difference to ordinary household budgets, a theme we explore in the future of bill payments.

Drex: the ambitious sibling

Drex began as Brazil's digital real project, aimed mostly at wholesale use. The idea was to put tokenised bank deposits, digital government bonds and smart contracts on a shared platform, so that buying a car, registering a property or getting rural credit could be settled automatically. The participant list included Banco do Brasil, Itaú, Bradesco, Santander, Nubank, cooperatives, Visa, Mastercard and the big cloud providers.

The platform was built on Hyperledger Besu, an Ethereum-compatible ledger. The trouble was privacy. Banks cannot put customer balances on a shared ledger without strong confidentiality, and the privacy tools tested proved immature. Phase two, with 16 consortia trying different use cases, ran late, Ledger Insights reported.

On 4 November 2025, the central bank told participants it would shut down the blockchain infrastructure, judging it insufficiently secure by its standards and too costly, Forbes Brasil reported. The next phase is narrower: a lien reconciliation system that lets investors pledge stocks and bonds as loan collateral, integrated with Pix and without blockchain. Some distributed ledger research continues in the background.

What Drex's retreat really means

It is tempting to call Drex a failure. We would call it a correction. The central bank started with a technology and went looking for problems. Now it is starting with a problem, collateral that is hard to use, and picking whatever tool solves it. That is how Pix was built too.

There is also a market twist. The Forbes Brasil report noted that around 90% of digital currencies circulating in Brazil are stablecoins. The private sector is tokenising on its own, which reduces the case for the central bank to build a parallel platform.

What other countries can learn

1. A public instant rail with mandatory participation and free transfers for individuals can change payment habits within a few years.
2. Adding features to an existing rail, such as recurring bills and contactless pay, can beat building a new form of money.
3. Privacy remains the hardest unsolved problem for shared ledgers holding bank balances.

For how other countries are approaching central bank digital money, see our 2026 CBDC tracker, and for the case for linking rails like Pix internationally, Project Nexus.

About this researchMuffinPay InsightsIndependent analysis of stablecoins, CBDCs, cross-border payments and digital public infrastructure. Every figure is linked to its source. Read our editorial standards →