What the central bank promised
On its Drex page the Banco Central do Brasil describes a single platform, built and operated by the bank, on which financial transactions with digital assets are settled. A person reaches it only through an authorised intermediary such as a bank, which moves money from a deposit account into a Drex wallet. The bank’s own example is buying a car: the money and the title change hands at the same moment, and if one side fails, both go back to their owners (Banco Central do Brasil).
What the pilot ran into
The pilot ran on Hyperledger Besu, an Ethereum-based platform for closed networks. Fitting privacy tools onto it proved hard and delayed the first phase, and the bank did not consider those tools sufficient or tested enough. A second phase, with 16 consortia trying out use cases, ended in July 2025 (Ledger Insights).
In August 2025 the bank’s governor, Gabriel Galípolo, presented a much narrower next stage at the Blockchain Rio conference. It is a lien reconciliation service that lets brokers’ clients pledge assets such as shares and bonds as collateral for loans. It uses no blockchain and is meant to work with Pix (Ledger Insights; Forbes). On 12 November 2025 Galípolo said that “after four years, the technology did not prove viable”, that Drex is not what is usually called a traditional central bank digital currency, and that the bank would announce later when the network will run (CNN Brasil).
Drex, Pix and bitcoin
Pix is the central bank’s instant payment system: it moves reais between accounts in seconds, at any hour, and is free for individuals (Banco Central do Brasil). Drex was never meant to replace it. Its job is settling assets and contracts, like the car sale above, where money and property have to move together.
From bitcoin, Drex differs at the root. Bitcoin was built so that no one keeps the main ledger. Drex is a ledger kept by the central bank and reached through banks. In the first chapter of the book I describe the arrangement it continues: somebody keeps the main ledger and everyone else trusts him, the bank can freeze your line or refuse a payment, and the central bank can print as many new lines as it sees fit (chapter “A Stone at the Bottom of the Sea”). Drex makes that ledger faster and more precise. It gives no one a way out of it. Why a digital currency without a bookkeeper was so hard to build before bitcoin, you can try in the experiment “One coin, two sellers”.
Sources
Banco Central do Brasil: Drex, Real Digital
Forbes: Brazil abandons blockchain for its Drex CBDC project (August 2025)
CNN Brasil: Galípolo says Drex technology proved unviable (12 November 2025)
Exame: Galípolo says Drex technology was not viable, but the project is not over (November 2025)
