CloudWalk Is First Crypto Firm in Brazil to Become a Licensed Payments Institution

This article is adapted from CoinDesk Brasil, a partnership between CoinDesk and InfoMoney, one of Brazil's leading financial news publications. Follow CoinDesk Brasil on Twitter.

Brazilian payments company CloudWalk has become the first crypto firm to be authorized by the Central Bank of Brazil as a payments institution.

The license will allow CloudWalk to offer credit cards to users and provide payment accounts to businesses. In addition, the company will now be the first crypto firm to connect directly with Pix, the Brazilian government's payment system, which has 126 million users.

In December CloudWalk launched a stablecoin pegged to the Brazilian real, the Brazilian digital real (BRCL), which currently operates on a proprietary blockchain. The stablecoin already serves as cash back for transactions made on CloudWalk’s Infinite Pay – the company's point-of-sale platform.

“With this license, we show that we are a reputable company, and we have the freedom to act as virtual currency issuers to make financial transactions of our stablecoin in our wallets,” Pablo de Mello, partner and commercial director at CloudWalk, told CoinDesk.

In November, CloudWalk raised $150 million in a Series C funding round at what was then a $2.15 billion post-money valuation, according to the company. (Post-money valuation is value after outside financing and/or capital injections are added to a company's balance sheet.)

CloudWalk has 300.000 business as clients across more than 5,000 cities in Brazil.

This article was translated by Andrés Engler, and edited by CoinDesk. The original Portuguese can be found here.