Brazil's CVM Forms 14-Department Task Force to Draft Tokenised Securities Framework

Brazil’s Comissão de Valores Mobiliários (CVM) has established a working group to develop an experimental regulatory framework for tokenised securities, with a primary proposal due to the CVM’s board within 60 days of the group’s formal installation. A broader review period runs to 120 days, with a possible 30-day extension. The group draws on 14 internal CVM departments and may engage government agencies, market associations, self-regulatory bodies, and external specialists.

The framework is designed to address the structural ambiguities that distributed ledger technology creates when applied to securities markets. Blockchains can compress functions ordinarily distributed across exchanges, custodians, registrars, depositories, and settlement systems into a single layer, generating unresolved questions around who holds the authoritative ownership record, how private keys are custodied, under what conditions transactions can be reversed, and where liability sits when infrastructure fails. The CVM’s existing 2022 guidance already treats a token’s economic characteristics as determinative of its securities status, so this exercise is squarely about the operational and legal architecture surrounding the asset rather than its classification.

Brazil’s tokenised real-world asset market has grown to approximately 12 billion reais (roughly $2.34 billion), with debentures and commercial notes accounting for around $1.3 billion of that total, according to tracking platform RWA Monitor. The CVM will feed findings from earlier regulatory sandbox experiments into the working group’s deliberations, giving it an empirical base drawn from live blockchain-based issuance and secondary trading trials. The 60-day clock and a named multi-department structure suggest this is a coordinated regulatory sprint rather than a routine review, and the outcome will likely set the operational baseline for any institution seeking to issue, hold, or trade securities on distributed ledgers in Brazil.