Brazil's CVM forms 14-department brain trust to figure out who holds the keys 🗝️

Brazil's securities regulator, the Comissão de Valores Mobiliários (CVM), has created a working group of 14 internal departments to draft an experimental framework for tokenized securities, with an initial proposal due to the agency's board within 60 days of installation. The broader review will run for 120 days and may be extended by an additional 30 days. The CVM said the group may also consult government agencies, market associations, self-regulatory bodies and outside specialists as it works through the questions raised when blockchains compress the roles of exchanges, custodians, registrars, depositories and settlement systems into a single stack.

The framework is expected to address official ownership records, custody of private keys, conditions under which transactions can be reversed and liability when infrastructure fails, alongside cybersecurity risks and international regulatory models. The regulator will also draw on results from earlier sandbox programs that tested blockchain-based issuance and secondary trading of securities. The CVM's existing 2022 guidance already treats a token as a security based on its economic characteristics regardless of the underlying ledger; the new review will focus on the surrounding infrastructure rather than the classification of the assets themselves.

Brazil's tokenized asset market has continued to expand in the interim. Data from Brazilian tracking platform RWA Monitor show the country's real-world asset market stands at approximately 12 billion reais, equivalent to roughly $2.34 billion, with debentures and commercial notes accounting for about $1.3 billion of that total. The CVM's announcement was reported on Jul 20, 2026.