Headline: Latin America diverges on crypto: El Salvador launches $100M tokenized SME push, Brazil eyes sovereign BTC reserve, Argentina ditches wallet-payroll plan El Salvador El Salvador is moving to channel $100 million into local small and medium-sized enterprises using tokenized equity. The program is a strategic partnership between Corporación Infinito and Stakiny, which plans to tokenize private-company shares to connect domestic businesses with international capital markets. Stakiny, currently seeking approval from El Salvador’s National Commission on Digital Assets, will provide the blockchain backbone. The platform pairs traditional shareholder agreements with blockchain-recorded tokens to enable real-time cap-table management, dividend distributions, governance events and secondary trading. It runs on an EVM-compatible network and will be accessible through a biometric mobile wallet — a setup designed to make equity ownership tradable, transparent and more accessible to global investors. Brazil Meanwhile, Brazil’s legislators are debating a far-reaching Bitcoin proposal. Congressman Luiz Gastão introduced Bill 4,501/2024 to the Chamber of Deputies’ Economic Development Committee, proposing the creation of a Sovereign Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (RESBit). The draft law would allow the state to gradually acquire Bitcoin up to 5% of Brazil’s foreign-exchange reserves, with custody in cold wallets and joint management by the Central Bank and the Ministry of Finance. Among the bill’s most notable measures: permitting Bitcoin to settle federal tax liabilities, removing certain transaction-documentation requirements for brokers and investors, and a proposed 100% income-tax exemption on revenues from Bitcoin and other digital assets. If advanced, the bill would mark a major step toward formalizing crypto on a state-level balance sheet. Argentina Argentina has taken a more cautious route. Lawmakers removed a provision from a labor-reform draft that would have allowed employers to pay wages by direct deposit into digital wallets. President Javier Milei’s party agreed to drop the clause to secure broader legislative support after pushback from traditional financial institutions, which lobbied senators against the measure. The episode highlights Argentina’s uneasy balance between growing adoption of digital-payment apps — such as Mercado Pago, Modo, Ualá and Lemon, which have gained users amid currency volatility and dollar shortages — and the entrenched banking sector. A central bank survey from several years ago showed about 47% of Argentines hold a bank account, underscoring persistent financial-inclusion gaps shaped by recurring inflation and past banking crises such as the 2001 “corralito.” What it means These three moves illustrate divergent policy experiments across Latin America: El Salvador aggressively embracing tokenization to mobilize private capital; Brazil considering formal state exposure to Bitcoin and broad tax relief for crypto activity; and Argentina scaling back a digital-payments payroll idea amid political and institutional resistance. Together they underscore the region’s evolving — and sometimes contradictory — approaches to crypto regulation, reserve-management strategies and financial inclusion. Read more AI-generated news on: undefined/news

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