The Story of Pix

Published October 12, 2026

Brazil has reported America to the World Trade organization because it thinks the US is imposing tariffs on them, unfairly. The tariff document had 6 reasons on there, #2 on the list was because of Pix. This feels like a david vs goliath story, except it’s not obvious to me who to root for.

Back in 2020, the Brazilian government built pix! If you want to generalize you can call it the brazilian zelle or venmo or cashapp. But it’s bigger than that! The government built it because 48M Brazilians didn’t have bank accounts and yet were spending billions in cash yearly and they wanted to bring them into the banking system. In Brazil, if a business takes credit cards, it’ll cost the business owner 2% to process. If they take a visa debit card, it’ll be 1%. If they take Pix, it’ll cost 0.2%! As a result, nobody is bringing out their visa debit cards or credit cards to pay in Brazil, they’re all using Pix.

The dollar is the meeting point currency for basically every country in the world. Even if a country is using their own currency day to day internally, the gravitational pull of the dollar is so powerful that it is always involved. For example: let’s say you live in Kenya, and you buy gas from the gas station in shillings. The Kenyan government that bought the oil from the middle east is not paying in shillings, they’re not even paying in UAE currency either, they’re paying in dollars. So, if the US issues a sanction against Kenya, or the UAE, or Brazil, their access to the dollar is cut off and they can’t pay for oil for their people or sell oil to their customers.

Today, you can NOW use pix in 8 countries, but they are actively working on expanding it everywhere because the more countries that support it, the more transactions the dollar has no business being involved in. So not only is pix a threat to american companies like visa competing fairly within Brazil, it is also a threat to the dollar the more ubiquitous it becomes. Technically, it introduces a new rail to move money that the dollar cannot find its way towards.

Meanwhile, this is not the first time the US has used tariffs to influence a country's financial infrastructure when it threatens the dollar. We did the same with India and UPI this summer, but the Indian government agreed to our demands. Brazil is not doing the same, that’s why they went to the WTO. And they’re not backing down because they’ve struck so much gold with pix, I think they want to be goliath too. And that’s why I don’t know who to root for.

On one hand, isn’t it a good thing that people rely on the dollar, thus our sanctions are impactful? I also see why Pix being operated and regulated by the government is bad for competition because it’s a clear conflict of interest. However, if a country takes its economic destiny into its own hands, who are we to stop them? And every time we do, what does that say about us?

The Story of Pix

Further Reading / Sources