Itaú Asset Administration, Brazil’s largest personal asset supervisor, has created a devoted crypto division and appointed former Hashdex govt João Marco Braga da Cunha to guide the brand new unit.
The unit builds on Itaú Asset’s present crypto merchandise, together with the financial institution’s Bitcoin exchange-traded fund (ETF) and a retirement fund providing publicity to digital belongings. Itaú Asset manages over 1 trillion reais ($185 billion) in belongings for its purchasers.
“The crypto asset phase has distinctive traits for producing alpha. It’s a comparatively new market that creates main alternatives as a result of its volatility,” Cunha stated. He beforehand served as portfolio administration director at Hashdex, the Brazilian agency that behind one of many nation’s first crypto ETFs.
The transfer provides to Itaú’s broader push into digital belongings. The financial institution already presents direct buying and selling of 10 cryptocurrencies pairs via its cell app, together with Bitcoin, Ether, Solana and USD Coin, with custody dealt with in-house.
Itaú Asset stated the brand new division will develop extra crypto merchandise, from fastened–earnings–fashion devices to higher-volatility methods similar to derivatives and staking-based funds. The unit will function throughout the agency’s mutual funds construction, which oversees over 117 billion reais throughout 15 funding desks.
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Brazil leads area in crypto adoption
Brazil has emerged as one of many world’s largest crypto markets, rating tenth globally in Chainalysis’ “2024 International Crypto Adoption Index.”
The expansion has been pushed by a supportive regulatory framework. In 2023, Brazil applied its first complete crypto regulation, establishing guidelines for digital asset service suppliers and granting the central financial institution oversight of the sector.
After the regulation took impact, Itaú Unibanco launched crypto buying and selling for retail purchasers in December 2023, initially providing buying and selling for Bitcoin (BTC) and Ether (ETH) inside its cell app, with custody of the belongings supplied straight by the financial institution.
In February 2025, Brazil’s securities regulator authorised the nation’s first spot XRP ETF from Hashdex. Across the identical time, native lender Braza Financial institution introduced plans to difficulty a real-pegged stablecoin on Ripple’s XRP Ledger.
Nonetheless, some regulatory uncertainty stays within the nation. In June, Brazil launched tax reform that changed the progressive mannequin with a flat 17.5% tax on all crypto capital beneficial properties.
The coverage eradicated the long-standing exemption permitting as much as 35,000 reais ($6,500) in month-to-month tax-free gross sales and prolonged to self-custody, offshore holdings, DeFi and NFTs transactions, together with staking yields.
The EO confronted instant backlash and was revoked later in the identical month.
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