The Brazilian central bank plans to treat transaction data from a central bank digital currency (CBDC) infrastructure called DREX as a direct input to establish a country's interest rate benchmark.
The Central Bank Executive Executive Executive Executive said at the Token Nation Conference held in Sao Paulo on June 4th that all payments and asset transfers recorded in the DREX distributed ledger will generate a structured entry for the time stamp.
By aggregating these entries at the group level, monetary authorities expect to measure changes in consumption, liquidity pockets, and sector performance in near real-time.
Staff economists supply metrics to existing output gaps and credit supply models before meetings of each monetary policy committee.
Vine said:
“We want to read more about economic activity faster than tax receipts and bank statements provide.”
He added that DREX only stores personal identifiers, preventing individual tracing.
Real-time ledger data for rate determination
This initiative extends banks' strategy to supplement investigation and banking system metrics with evidence on the chain.
Videira outlined the workflows that appear in the policy dashboard where anonymized DREX data passes through internal filters and merges with wholesale payment flows on the same ledger, tracking spending on merchant categories, collateral movements and regional trade volumes.
With potential or fluidity in power, the board was able to reduce speeds faster than usual. Conversely, when spending heats up, the same dashboard may support a faster tightening vote.
Executives framed the approach as an analytical upgrade rather than as a policy delegation to the algorithm.
Videira also detailed the credit access channel. With limited bank history, borrowers can allow lenders to check their records of DREX cash flows and provide auditable evidence of their income without the need for pay stubs.
He said the central bank is planning to publish a consultation paper on its model this year, and the ledger plans to keep usernames off-chain while maintaining transaction integrity through consensus verification.
Blockchain and AI
The bank hopes universities, startups and public institutions will build an analytics layer in DREX. Videira said that large-scale language models allocate a significant portion of their computational budget to process unstructured inputs.
Ledgers that label fields such as payer type and merchant code allow the engine to proceed directly to pattern recognition. That added itGricultural Agency Embrapa and public health agencies can query anonymized datasets to improve crop yield predictions or disease spread simulations.
Drek Spirot entered limited production in March, with 16 institutions testing tokenized public debt and deposit tokens. The full rollout will rely on Congressional approval of the proposal introduced last month.
Videira was closed by noting that policy ownership remains in the Monetary Commission, but that the trading class belongs to society.
