1. A New Legal Weapon Targeting Organised Crime's Financial Backbone
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva signed Law No. 15.358 into effect on March 25, enacting one of the most comprehensive organised crime reform packages in the country's recent history. At its core, the legislation — widely referred to as the Anti-Gang Law — is designed to attack criminal organisations not through conventional policing alone, but by methodically dismantling their financial infrastructure. Digital assets occupy a central role in that strategy. For the first time under Brazilian law, cryptocurrency confiscated from criminal networks can be formally channelled into the public security system, providing law enforcement with a direct financial return from the assets it seizes during investigations.
2. Provisional Use of Seized Assets Before Conviction
One of the most operationally significant features of the new law is its provision allowing authorities to put seized cryptoassets to work before a criminal case reaches its final verdict. Subject to judicial approval, seized digital assets can be provisionally deployed to fund policing operations, intelligence activities, and officer training while investigations and prosecutions are still ongoing. This represents a meaningful departure from the more passive approach of simply holding confiscated assets in custody until legal proceedings conclude — a process that, depending on the complexity of the case, can take years. By enabling the provisional use of seized funds, the law ensures that law enforcement agencies can benefit from confiscated assets in a timeframe that is relevant to their operational needs.
3. Expanded Judicial Powers Over Digital Assets
Beyond the redistribution mechanism, Law No. 15.358 substantially broadens the authority of Brazilian courts to intervene in the digital financial lives of suspected criminals. Judges are now empowered to order the freezing, blocking, or outright seizure of digital wallets, exchange accounts, and access to online platforms during the course of an investigation, provided sufficient evidence of a serious qualifying crime exists. Courts can also authorise the restriction of transaction activity on cryptocurrency exchanges when digital assets are identified as instruments of criminal conduct — treating them in the same legal category as other proceeds of crime or tools used in its commission. Upon conviction, individuals permanently lose access to both the formal financial system and the cryptocurrency ecosystem, a measure designed to make financial exclusion a durable consequence of organised crime activity.
4. Targeting the Groups Behind Brazil's Criminal Landscape
The law's scope is explicitly directed at the major organised crime structures operating within Brazil, including ultraviolent gangs such as the PCC (Primeiro Comando da Capital) and Comando Vermelho, as well as paramilitary militias that have expanded their territorial control across urban and peri-urban areas. These organisations have increasingly adopted digital assets — both as stores of value resistant to conventional banking oversight and as tools for cross-border money movement — making cryptocurrency seizure a meaningful pressure point. Penalties have been significantly increased for a range of offences associated with organised crime activity, including territorial control, obstruction of law enforcement, and the deliberate use of encrypted messaging applications or privacy tools to conceal criminal communications and financial flows.
5. A National Criminal Financial Database
A key structural component of the legislation is the establishment of a centralised national database designed to map the financial networks and asset structures of known criminal organisations. The database is intended to integrate information from police agencies, prosecutors, and courts, creating a shared intelligence architecture that enables faster and more coordinated responses to the complex financial operations through which criminal groups move and conceal wealth. By building a consolidated picture of how money — including digital assets — flows through criminal networks, the system aims to reduce the fragmentation that has historically slowed asset recovery and prosecution timelines in complex organised crime cases.
6. International Cooperation Mechanisms
The law also formalises Brazil's capacity to work with foreign counterparts on asset recovery and intelligence sharing. As cryptocurrency transactions are inherently borderless, criminal organisations have long exploited jurisdictional gaps to move funds across boundaries beyond the reach of any single national law enforcement body. The new legislation creates explicit legal pathways for Brazilian authorities to engage in cross-border investigations and coordinate asset seizures with international partners — a provision that reflects the global nature of the criminal networks the law is designed to target. Brazil's Federal Police has already demonstrated the scale of this challenge: its Operation Lusocoin in 2025 uncovered a sprawling money laundering and foreign exchange evasion architecture of exceptional scale, according to blockchain analytics firm TRM Labs.
7. Crypto as an Enforcement Tool, Not a State Reserve
The approach Brazil has taken with Law No. 15.358 stands in deliberate contrast to the model adopted by some other governments. In the United States, for example, cryptocurrency seized in the course of criminal proceedings has been earmarked to contribute to a national digital asset stockpile — treating confiscated coins as a potential long-term reserve asset for the state. Brazil's law takes a different philosophical stance: rather than accumulating seized digital assets as a form of sovereign wealth, the government treats them as an operational resource to be recycled directly into the security apparatus that produced the seizure in the first place. The framing positions cryptocurrency not as a store of national value but as a recoverable instrument of crime that can and should be converted back into law enforcement capacity.
8. The Parallel Bitcoin Reserve Debate
Brazil's legislative picture around digital assets is not as simple as a single enforcement law, however. Running in parallel to the Anti-Gang Law's enactment is an unresolved legislative debate about whether Brazil should create a formal Strategic Sovereign Bitcoin Reserve, referred to domestically as RESBit. The proposal, originally introduced in 2024 and reintroduced in February 2026 by Federal Deputy Luiz Gastão, outlines a phased framework for acquiring up to one million BTC over several years. The RESBit bill would prohibit the sale of judicially seized Bitcoin, allow federal taxes to be collected in Bitcoin, and encourage public entities to participate in Bitcoin mining and custody. If passed, the two legislative frameworks would exist in tension with each other — one directing seized crypto toward public security spending, the other envisioning it as a long-term national reserve. As of March, the reserve bill's prospects remained uncertain.
9. The Crypto Tax Policy Complication
Adding a third thread to Brazil's evolving digital asset governance picture is the decision by Finance Minister Dario Durigan to delay discussions on proposed changes to Brazil's crypto tax policy. According to reports, Durigan chose to postpone the tax reform conversation specifically to avoid generating political controversy ahead of Brazil's presidential election in October. The proposed changes would have reclassified certain crypto transactions — potentially bringing some into a foreign exchange tax framework with rates as high as 3.5%, a level that industry groups have argued is both legally contestable and economically counterproductive. By deferring this debate, the government has effectively isolated the Anti-Gang Law's crypto provisions as the near-term centrepiece of its digital asset policy — prioritising enforcement over regulation of compliant market participants, at least for now.
10. Custodial Challenges and the Lessons From Other Jurisdictions
The law's provision that custody of seized digital assets will fall to public authorities by default — unless a court determines that technical constraints make this impractical — raises practical questions that other jurisdictions have learned to navigate the hard way. In South Korea, for instance, law enforcement agencies lost access to approximately $1.4 million in Bitcoin after failing to follow proper custody procedures. In a separate incident, representatives of the National Tax Service photographed seed phrases — the private key recovery words that control access to a crypto wallet — posting them in a way that briefly allowed an unknown individual to drain nearly $5 million in tokens before the funds were ultimately returned. For Brazil, which is now legislating a formal system for managing confiscated digital assets at potentially significant scale, establishing robust, institutionally sound custody procedures will be as important as the legal framework itself.