Brazil’s top financial policy body banned some pension funds from investing in cryptocurrencies because they are too risky.

The National Monetary Council (CMN) forbade closed pension entities known as Entidades Fechadas de Previdência Complementar (EFPCs) from allocating any portion of their guarantee reserves into bitcoin (BTC) or other digital currencies.

The EFPCs manage retirement savings for tens of thousands of unionized and company-employed workers and their reserves are typically made up of bonds and equities.

“The resolution also prohibits investments in virtual assets, considering their specific investment characteristics and associated risk,” a Ministry of Finance notice circulating among local news outlets reads.

The ruling was published last week under under Resolution 5.202/2025 by the National Monetary Council (CMN).

In contrast, last year British pension specialist Cartwright guided the country’s first pension fund to make a bitcoin allocation worth 3% of its assets. Several U.S. states have begun experimenting with crypto allocations for their pension systems, despite federal-level caution. Wisconsin’s state investment board, for example, revealed in February it had invested $340 million in bitcoin through BlackRock’s ETF (IBIT).

The ruling does not appear to apply to open pension funds or individual retirement products sold by banks and insurers. These are regulated separately and may allow indirect investment through exchange-traded funds or tokenized asset platforms.

Japanese hotel firm Metaplanet (3350) has issued a 2 billion yen ($13.3 million) zero-coupon ordinary bond, with proceeds earmarked for additional bitcoin (BTC) purchases. The bond is scheduled to redeem on Sept. 30.

In addition, Metaplanet has been added to the BetaShares Crypto Innovators ETF (CRYP), a fund with over $50 billion in assets under management, according to CEO Simon Gerovich.

Metaplanet holds the largest weighting in the ETF at 15.5%, surpassing notable industry names such as Strategy (MSTR) and Coinbase (COIN), which take the second and third spots, respectively.

The ETF is traded on the Australian Securities Exchange (ASX) and offers investors exposure to companies operating at the forefront of the crypto and blockchain sectors. While, the CRYP ETF is down 23% year-to-date.

Metaplanet is currently ranked as the tenth-largest publicly listed holder of bitcoin, with a treasury of 3,200 BTC.

Disclaimer: Parts of this article were generated with the assistance from AI tools and reviewed by our editorial team to ensure accuracy and adherence to our standards. For more information, see CoinDesk’s full AI Policy.

Economists have long theorized about «perfect markets» — where buyers and sellers operate with complete information, zero transaction costs, and frictionless exchange. Despite technological advances, this ideal remains elusive in today’s fragmented digital economy.

Our current commerce landscape is siloed across competing platforms, each creating its own walled garden. Amazon, eBay, and specialized marketplaces for luxury goods may have digitized commerce, but they’ve simply replaced physical barriers with digital ones. These platforms deliberately maintain high costs and barriers designed to prevent users from migrating to competitors. Algorithms deployed by these platforms are trained explicitly to maximize revenue by adjusting prices dynamically based on comprehensive market data, often keeping prices artificially elevated depending on the broader internet pricing environment.

Such practices result in significant price disparities for identical assets across platforms. Inefficiencies persist because the costs of exploiting them—such as substantial platform fees, lengthy onboarding requirements, limited interoperability, and time delays in transactions—typically outweigh potential arbitrage profits. When the cost to exploit a price difference exceeds the potential earnings from the trade, these inefficiencies remain entrenched, allowing platforms to maintain control over users..

Platforms: Efficient Coordinators, Extractive Middlemen

Today’s platforms serve two essential functions: they aggregate supply and demand, and they establish trusted exchange mechanisms. But they operate with fundamentally misaligned incentives. Platforms don’t work for users; they work for shareholders, with a fiduciary duty to maximize extraction.

This results in market failures where platforms invariably exploit their position as intermediaries through high fees, manipulated search results, and proprietary ecosystems designed to lock in participants. The platform model is inherently extractive by design.

The AI-Crypto Revolution in Commerce

The convergence of two powerful technologies is about to disrupt this status quo: AI agents and crypto protocols.

AI agents can perform many platform functions — especially supply and demand aggregation — at a fraction of the cost. Unlike platforms, these agents work directly for users, fundamentally realigning incentives. Meanwhile, crypto protocols solve the fair — exchange problem through low-cost, trust-minimized transactions where users only need to trust audited, immutable code rather than corporate intermediaries.

The combination creates what I call «decentralized commerce agents» — AI that can efficiently discover price differences across marketplaces while using crypto protocols to facilitate secure, low-cost exchange. This dramatically reduces the total cost of arbitrage, suddenly making previously non-viable price differences economically feasible to exploit.

The Path to Perfect Markets

Here’s where it gets interesting: by enabling these agents to retain profits from successful arbitrage operations, they can strategically redistribute gains to incentivize adoption of decentralized commerce protocols. Each successful arbitrage can offer discounts to buyers, bonuses to sellers, and fund continued development of the agent ecosystem.

This creates a powerful feedback loop: more users generate more transactions, which create more arbitrage opportunities, yielding more profits, which attract more users. Each cycle consolidates liquidity on decentralized protocols while reducing the viability of isolated, extractive platforms.

The result is a steady progression toward that theoretical ideal of a perfect market — a single, liquid marketplace for all assets with minimal transaction costs, maximum price transparency, and efficient pricing.

Why This Matters

For consumers, this means lower prices, better selection, and truly competitive markets free from platform manipulation. For businesses, it means direct access to customers without paying exorbitant platform taxes. For society, it means markets that more efficiently allocate resources based on actual supply and demand rather than platform algorithmic manipulation.

The technical pieces are falling into place. AI capabilities are advancing rapidly, while crypto protocols for decentralized commerce continue to mature. What’s missing is the recognition of how powerful these technologies become when combined specifically to disrupt platform economics.

Decentralized commerce agents represent not merely an incremental improvement but a fundamental realignment of economic coordination. For the first time, we have the tools to make perfect markets more than just a theoretical construct in economics textbooks. The question is whether we’ll seize this opportunity to build a more efficient, accessible, and equitable commercial landscape for everyone.