Latin America’s Crypto Testing Ground: How Ripple and Cardano Are Wiring Brazil’s Institutional Future

While institutional adoptions of blockchain technology continue to grow worldwide, Brazil is quickly becoming one of the most promising jurisdictions for enterprise-level solutions on public ledgers. Unlike speculative retail assets, both XRP Ledger (XRPL) and Cardano are being integrated as auxiliary technologies within regulated financial market infrastructures and energy networks.

With clear support from both the Central Bank and CVM, these blockchains are being explored as complementary systems which extend the capabilities of existing corporate and national institutions, while also preserving their regulatory dominance.

In capital markets, CSD BR – the central securities depository for BRL 22+ TR of assets – has begun utilizing XRPL as an alternate record-keeping and auditing substrate for investment fund shares, starting with products from BTG Pactual. While CSD BR’s own systems retain official ownership records, they have been extended into the XRPL blockchain as a permissioned database for corporate and retail investors who meet KYC/AML requirements. Using the Multi-Purpose Tokens standard and custody infrastructure provided by Ripple, this initiative has the potential to expand into native asset listings and trading between financial institutions.

Meanwhile in the energy and environmental sector, state oil company Petrobras has partnered with the Cardano Foundation and PUC-Rio’s Ledger Labs to develop proof-of-concept platforms which utilizie Cardano-based tokens to record supply chain and sustainability attributes of cleaner-burning fuels. These include Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) and Diesel R, which seek to qualify for carbon-offset crediting under the ICAO CORSIA book-and-balancing framework. By creating an immutable audit trail of production data, the project aims to streamline the certification process for alternative energy sources while preventing double-counting emissions reductions by different buyers. This has the potential to extend to other areas of the energy sector, as well as serve as a model for how capital market infrastructure such as CSD BR’s can be augmented with public ledgers.