Brazil’s BRICS Currency: Lula Plots, Hackers Pillage, and Green Bitcoin Goes Bananas 🍌

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Latam Insights—a bizarre oasis in the digital desert—returns with a dispatch from the far-flung cryptosphere of Latin America. Revel in this week’s spectacle: Lula envisions a BRICS coin utopia, Tether attempts to redeem Satoshi with a brush of green, and Brazil’s Central Bank, bored of boredom, entertains hackers with an involuntary crypto game show.

Brazilian President Lula’s Latest Fling: The BRICS Magic Money Machine

Never one to miss out on global spectacle, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva charmed the crowd at the New Development Bank’s soirée by floating a juicy proposition: a BRICS bloc trade currency! The aim? To puncture the dominance of old-school powers and their deeply touching habit of prescribing economic “austerity” to the less fortunate (how original!).

At the 10th annual NDB jamboree, Lula dared everyone to imagine a solution to old problems that isn’t further austerity, drudgery, or the world’s dreariest PowerPoint. In a moment of almost Shakespearean import, he pronounced:

The debate over the need for a new trade currency is extremely important. It’s complex, I know, and it presents political problems, I know, but if people don’t find a new formula, the 21st century will end the same way the 20th century began, and that will not be beneficial for humanity.

In other words: we need to shake things up, or prepare for another century of déjà vu and economic slapstick. Onward, Monetary Revolutionaries! 💸🌎

Tether’s Pastures of Renewable Bliss: When Crypto Meets Sugarcane

Proving that no one can resist the siren song of crypto’s greenwashing opera, Tether (crypto behemoth and connoisseur of regulatory migraine) locked arms with Adecoagro—a genteel agricultural beast—to dream up Bitcoin mining in Brazil’s lush, renewable heartlands. The plot? Monetize Adecoagro’s excess energy—because why simply feed cows when you can power digital gold-diggers under the tropics’ emerald canopy?

The pair hope to transform surplus electricity into Satoshis, because nothing says “new asset class” like a tractor running on solar and a server farm humming in the distance. Will the cows appreciate the halving cycles? We may never know. 🐮⚡

Meanwhile, in the Bank Vault: $180 Million Absconded, Courtesy of Crypto

Not to be overshadowed by monetary daydreams, Brazil’s banking sector suffered what can only be described as a digital joyride. On an otherwise typical Tuesday, local journalists reported a grand raid upon C&M—the odd wizard behind software for goliaths like Bradesco, Brazil’s second-favorite piggybank.

Untroubled by security protocols—and clearly bored—a mysterious party found a vulnerability, hijacked accounts, and slipped millions out the back, channeling the loot through, of course, crypto. Because fiat withdrawals are so 2007. Bradesco and Credsystem (the neighborhood credit card peddler) found themselves generous benefactors to this audacious enterprise.

Will they recoup their millions? Stay tuned. Or don’t—the hackers probably already have.

For those with a taste for further financial eccentricity, subscribe to Latam Insights below. The next edition may contain an apology from the IT department, or perhaps, a recipe for disaster involving cacao beans and blockchain. 👀📬

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2025-07-07 07:57