Adoption Picks up Pace in LATM with Brazilian Central Bank’s DeFi Project & Developments in Argentina

cryptonews.com:

Crypto adoption is on the march in Brazil, where the nation’s Central Bank has commissioned a commercial banking giant to build a DeFi solution for its prototype central bank digital currency (CBDC). Meanwhile, across the border in Argentina, a city says that it will accept tax payments made using USD-pegged stablecoins – while the capital Buenos Aires also wants to get in on the action.

In an official notice, Brazil’s Central Bank said that it has selected Itaú Unibanco, one of the largest commercial financial institutions in the nation, to work on the creation of a number of stablecoins, including a fiat real-pegged token. This stablecoin will be used in conjunction with other fiat-pegged tokens. These will be pegged to other major global fiats. Although details are so far scant, it appears that the Central Bank wants to look at the way various CBDCs could be used on digital platforms.

The Central bank called the project a “DeFi liquidity pool,” and described it as a “platform that enables custody, currency exchange, and alternative investments via blockchain technology and smart contracts.”

Itaú has been asked to formulate a “use case” that will comprise “creating a liquidity pool, with tokens that emulate stablecoins that [are pegged 1:1] with the real, dollar, and other fiat currencies.”

The Central Bank spoke of the need to create a solution whose “operations” would be “similar to that of liquidity DeFi solutions that currently operate in the [cryptoasset] market.”

The Central Bank has also asked Itaú and a number of other traditional finance and crypto-space players to work on a series of crypto and blockchain-related projects. The projects are the brainchild of the bank’s Laboratory of Financial and Technological