The new attacks by the US government United States against the Pix payment system This week, a debate was reignited in Brazil about when and by whom the technology was created.
On Monday, the American government concluded a major commercial investigation launched against Brazil in July last year. The report had the Pix as one of their targets.
“Brazil has unfairly harmed American companies that operate in competing electronic payment services, including through policies that favor its national champion, Pix”, states the document.
The following day, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) appeared with a poster during an event in Goiás that said: “Pix is from Brazil”.
“You saw that I came here with this banner: ‘Pix is from Brazil’. It’s because yesterday, the American president, in an untimely attitude — because we were negotiating after my visit to President (Donald) Trump — in an untimely manner, announced an increase in taxation on Brazilian things to 25%, based on a lie”, said Lula, who is a pre-candidate in the October presidential election.
“I told him: hey, Trump, hey man, instead of being afraid of Pix, puts Pix to work in the USA. Make a Pix for us.”
A day later, senator and presidential candidate Flávio Bolsonaro (PL-RJ) displayed a poster at an event in Minas Gerais that said: “Pix is from Brazil and Bolsonaro”.
In his speech, he said: “It’s a lie that Pix is threatened. The payment method has absolutely nothing to do with all this. Pix is Brazilian, it was created by (former) president (Jair) Bolsonaro. Pix is not taxed because President Bolsonaro determined that it should not be, it is something that has revolutionized security, so this is not under discussion.”
After all, how was Pix created?
HOW WAS PIX BORN?
Pix is an instant payment system created by Central Bank technicianswhich allows you to transfer money between accounts in seconds, at any time and day. It is known to be fast and secure and can be used from checking, savings or prepaid accounts.
THE system became popular in Brazil and has impressive numbers. According to the Central Bankmore than 170 million individuals — which is equivalent to 80% of the Brazilian population — have already made a transfer via Pix. Until October last year, more than R$3 trillion had been moved by Pix.
In January of this year alone, more than 7 billion transactions were carried out. On December 12, 2025, the system recorded its record: there were 313 million transactions in the same day.
Pix was launched in November 2020 — during the former president’s government Jair Bolsonaro.
According to a 2022 Central Bank report on Pix, the first demonstration about “solutions that allow, at low cost, real-time and uninterrupted retail payments” took place in 2014, during the government of Dilma Rousseffin a report Brazilian Payment System Surveillance Report.
But Pix only began to be developed by Central Bank technicians in May 2018 — still under the government of Michel Temer. Between the creation of a specific working group and the launch of the system, around 31 months passed.
Central Bank Ordinance 97,909 of May 2018 established a working group with the objective of “contributing to the construction of a competitive, efficient, safe and inclusive instant payments ecosystem”.
The name Pix was not yet used at that time. But some foundations of the system were already defined in this ordinance.
“The centralized settlement infrastructure will be operated by the Central Bank of Brazil and will be available 24 hours a day, seven days a week and every day of the year. Transactions will be settled one by one, at the moment the settlement order is accepted by the infrastructure”, states the ordinance.
The working group for instant payments (GT-PI) of May 2018 was, according to the Central Bank, “the first step towards the development of instant payments in Brazil”. This group was open to any party interested in the topic, and received contributions from more than 130 participants.
In December 2018, the last month of the Temer government, the Central Bank released statement 32,927 in which it established fundamental Pix requirements that were approved by the institution’s board of directors. In this statement, the BC officially positioned itself as leader of the Pix development and implementation process.
From October 2019, under the Bolsonaro government, the technological infrastructure began to be developed.
The Pix brand was launched in February 2020. According to Banco Centrarl, the brand “is based on technology, transaction and pixel, and represents the transposition of the limits of the financial system, communication between market agents and the solidity of the pixel”.
One year after the start of the development of the technological infrastructure, in October 2020, registration of keys by initial users began. On November 3, the system began to operate in a restricted manner — and on November 16 it began to operate fully.
In October 2020, a month before the official launch of the system, then-president Jair Bolsonaro expressed his ignorance of the payment method when he was congratulated by a supporter as he left Palácio da Alvorada.
At the time, Bolsonaro was confused and thought it was something related to the reduction of bureaucracy in civil aviation. Upon hearing the supporter’s explanation that Pix was a new payment method created by the Central Bank, he replied: “I wasn’t aware of it, I’m going to talk to (then BC president) Roberto Campos this week.”
IMPACT
In Brazil, the way Pix was structured benefited national companies, especially digital banks and fintechs. “Leveraging the Pix model”, they developed innovation and grew, even expanding to other markets.
This ended up making the country an international reference, inspiring other countries, such as Colombia.
“Brazil is well known today for its ‘neobanks’ (digital banks) and its domestic financial innovation ecosystem,” researcher Polina Kempinsky told BBC News Brasil.
Nobel Prize in Economics Paul Krugman praised Pix for being almost instantaneous and for having low transaction costs and suggested that Brazil may have invented the future of money with this system.
“Other nations can learn from Brazil’s success in developing a digital payment system,” Krugman wrote.
And he said the Brazilian payments system is “actually achieving what cryptocurrency advocates have falsely claimed it can achieve through blockchain – low transaction costs and financial inclusion.”
“Compare the 93% of Brazilians who use Pix with the 2%, that’s right, 2% of Americans who used cryptocurrencies to buy something or make a payment in 2024”, said the economist in 2025.
“Oh, and using Pix doesn’t create an incentive to kidnap people and torture them until they hand over their encryption keys. So will we have a Pix-like system in the United States? No. Or at least not for a long time.”
Experts also told BBC News Brasil that the Pix bothered some of the American big techs.
“We are talking here about a technological competition, where the US aims to take away any type of technology that can offer some type of innovation and that is not being managed within the country itself or that is not under US control”, says Bruna Martins dos Santos, policy and advocacy manager at Witness, an international non-profit organization focused on technology and human rights, in an interview in July 2025.
WHAT THE US SAYS ABOUT PIX
In the conclusion presented this week of the investigation based on called Section 301 of the Commerce Act of 1974 —a legal instrument that allows Washington to investigate foreign practices considered unfair or discriminatory against American companies and products— the US government accuses Pix of “unfairly harming American companies”.
The investigation says that the Brazilian Central Bank plays a dual role — “as regulator and owner/operator” of Pix — creating a “conflict of interests, in the absence of adequate procedural safeguards”.
“The bank has acted as a regulator to disfavor US electronic payment service providers and favor Pix. For example, the Central Bank requires the use of Pix by financial institutions with more than 500 thousand accounts and requires that Pix be displayed on the main screen of the application of participating institutions with equal or greater prominence than any other payment or transfer functionality.”
Furthermore, there is criticism that the Central Bank demands that Pix be offered fee-free to customers. According to the conclusion of the investigation, Brazilian authorities force American companies to promote the Brazilian competitor (Pix) without compensation to American institutions.
“Brazil’s acts, policies and practices related to the preferential treatment given to Pix are unfair and discriminatory. It is unfair to require competitors to offer advantages to Pix, such as availability, visibility and fee limits, and Brazil discriminates against US electronic payment service providers by granting these advantages only to its Brazilian national champion.”
As a result of the investigation, which includes other criticisms of Brazil’s trade practices, the US proposes 25% tariffs on Brazilian products. These proposals will still be negotiated between governments until July 15th.
Febraban (Brazilian Federation of Banks) defended Pix from criticism from the American government. In a statement, the entity said that the investigation’s conclusions were based on “incomplete information” about the objectives and functioning of the system.
“Pix is a payment infrastructure, and not a commercial product, which favors competition and the smooth functioning of the payment system,” said Febraban.
The entity says that Pix contributes to financial inclusion by reducing costs and expanding access to digital payment methods.
Text originally published here
