Bitcoin Becomes Méliuz’s ‘Escape Hatch’ From Brazil’s 22% Rates

When Brazilian fintech firm Méliuz (CASH3) assessed its steadiness sheet in late 2024, it found one thing stunning: it was worthwhile, debt-free and rising, but the market had valued its enterprise at zero.

“When you ignore the money readily available,” Diego Kolling, Head of Bitcoin Technique at Méliuz, instructed CoinDesk on the Blockchain Convention Brasil 2025. “The corporate was price nothing.” That cash, about R$250 million on the time, was largely parked in authorities bonds. After taxes and inflation, returns had been unfavourable. “We had been seized,” he mentioned.

So Méliuz did one thing radical for a Brazilian listed firm: it targeted on Bitcoin.

The shift, Kolling mentioned, was surprisingly easy. The corporate’s shareholders voted overwhelmingly to implement a bitcoin treasury technique when referred to as upon to take action, with 66% of shareholders collaborating – the most important shareholder turnout within the firm’s historical past.

It did this not by issuing low cost dollar-denominated debt to purchase BTC – like lots of its friends – however by utilizing fairness issuance and different methods that now embrace derivatives. Whereas tapping the debt market could be a low cost type of financing, he says, this technique would not translate to rising markets like Brazil, the place rates of interest hover round 15% and personal loans usually price greater than 20%, Kolling explains.

“The technique competes with the Fed price of 4%,” he added. “We’re coping with 22%.” The maths simply would not work.

Méliuz can also be leaning towards a special playbook, impressed by Japanese bitcoin treasury agency Metaplanet, which sells cash-backed places to generate returns. Méliuz now makes use of the identical technique, promoting choices to earn a return on the capital reserved for the acquisition of BTC. It buys bitcoin with the earnings from producing returns whereas sustaining the principal technique.

Kolling didn’t reveal the extent of this exercise for Méliuz, however made it clear that the corporate is dedicated to a tough cap of roughly 20% of BTC shares deployed in return-generating methods, and that the corporate started testing these methods with smaller quantities earlier than deploying extra capital.

Méliuz, identified for its cashback and monetary companies platform serving greater than 30 million registered customers in Brazil, retains 80% of its bitcoin in chilly storage and makes use of solely small parts to generate returns by derivatives, with potential future growth into different methods akin to Lightning or bitcoin-backed debt.

However the motivation stays clear: not hypothesis, however survival. “Bitcoin turned the escape hatch,” Kolling mentioned, “when clinging to fiat meant our treasury would soften sooner than we may construct it.”