In an article published in Valor Econômico, Tiago Severo Gomes and Giulia Barbieri analyze the enactment of Law No. 15,358/2026, the Antifaction Law, and the point that often escapes public debate: Brazil's challenge today is not, essentially, a normative one. It is one of enforcement.
The new law represents a significant advance. It strengthens integration among state bodies, expands asset freezing mechanisms and recognizes the central role of digital assets in contemporary crime. The diagnosis is correct: crime has changed, and the law must keep pace.
But legal recognition, by itself, does not solve the problem. The authors review the structural bottlenecks that separate statutory provisions from institutional capacity:
- Freezing crypto-assets depends on operational protocols, electronic channels with service providers, standards for preserving logs and teams able to act at the speed of the digital environment. Initiatives such as CriptoJud are moving in the right direction, but the gap between rule and enforcement undermines the system's deterrent effect.
- Interoperability among the Federal Revenue Service, the Central Bank, the Public Prosecutor's Office, the police and the Judiciary is not limited to sharing databases. It requires a common language, compatible taxonomies and standardized workflows. Brazil does not need to produce more data; it needs to make better use of the data it already has.
- Connectivity infrastructure, including the adoption of IPv6, is a public security issue, not merely a technological one.
- In the private sector, compliance models focused exclusively on KYC prove insufficient. Risk is no longer found only in the customer and now resides in the connections, hence the relevance of practices such as KYE (Know Your Employee), KYP (Know Your Partner) and effective monitoring of transactional flows.
The authors' conclusion is direct: Brazil must turn legal authority into institutional capacity, abstract provisions into real procedure, and scattered data into useful intelligence, because crime has already made this transition and the State is still midway.
