Banco do Brasil completes Latin America's first digital structured note investment via Citi blockchain deal

Banco do Brasil has completed Latin America's first digital structured note investment, deploying $5 million from its treasury into a digitally native security issued by Citigroup. Executed on Euroclear's D-FMI blockchain platform, the transaction bypasses traditional sequential processing steps. This milestone highlights a growing institutional shift toward distributed ledger technology to improve transaction traceability, accelerate cross-border settlement, and establish new standards for digital asset management.

Banco do Brasil Citi investment

• ▪Banco do Brasil described the $5 million transaction as its first investment in digital notes and the first transaction of its kind involving a Latin American institution.
• ▪Banco do Brasil invested $5 million from its proprietary treasury in a digitally native structured note issued by Citigroup on September 1, 2026.

Euroclear D-FMI blockchain platform

• ▪The digitally native structured note was issued on Euroclear's Digital Financial Market Infrastructure platform, which uses distributed ledger technology.
• ▪Euroclear operates the Digital Financial Market Infrastructure platform to extend its securities settlement and post-trade infrastructure to digitally native financial instruments.

Digital structured note issuance

• ▪The structured note was created directly in digital form on the blockchain platform from issuance, rather than being a tokenized representation of a conventional asset.
• ▪Citigroup Global Markets Funding Luxembourg SCA issued the structured note, while Citibank N.A.'s London branch served as the issuance and payment agent.

Latin America institutional blockchain

• ▪The participation of Banco do Brasil, which is primarily owned by the Brazilian Federal Government, could spur wider institutional adoption of digital notes in Latin America.
• ▪Banco do Brasil previously participated in the pilot phase of Drex, the Brazilian central bank digital currency, by proposing an offline payments option.

Operational efficiency improvements

• ▪Unlike conventional notes that depend on sequential processing across separate systems, the digital note is managed through blockchain infrastructure to provide a common digital record.
• ▪Banco do Brasil stated that native asset digitization reduces operational steps, increases transaction traceability, and supports integrated settlement, reconciliation, and asset management.

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