In an article published in Valor Econômico, Tiago Severo Gomes and Giulia Barbieri analyze the enactment of Law No. 15,358/2026, the Lei Antifacção (Anti-Faction Law), and the point that often escapes public debate: Brazil's challenge today is not essentially one of legislation. It is one of enforcement.
The new law represents significant progress. 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.
Legal recognition alone, however, does not solve the problem. The authors walk through the structural bottlenecks that separate legal provision from institutional capacity:
- Freezing crypto assets depends on operational protocols, electronic channels with service providers, standards for log preservation 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 Receita Federal (Federal Revenue Service), the Banco Central, the Public Prosecutor's Office, the police and the Judiciary is not limited to database sharing. 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 IPv6 adoption, is a public security issue, not merely a technological one.
- In the private sector, compliance models centered exclusively on KYC are proving insufficient. Risk no longer lies only with the customer but in the connections, hence the relevance of practices such as KYE (Know Your Employee), KYP (Know Your Partner) and effective monitoring of transaction flows.
The authors' conclusion is direct: Brazil must turn legal competence into institutional capacity, abstract provisions into real procedures and scattered data into actionable intelligence, because crime has already made this transition and the State is still only halfway there.
