Gringo Coin provides a customer-facing layer over the regulated Brazilian foreign exchange system. Customers hold balances in supported currencies — US Dollar, Euro, British Pound, Australian Dollar, and Brazilian Real — and execute conversions and payments through the product. All foreign exchange operations execute through a chartered câmbio partner bank operating under Bacen authorisation. Settlement to Brazilian recipients occurs via Pix, the dominant Brazilian payment rail. Inbound funding from foreign accounts uses standard banking rails including ACH, SEPA, and wire transfers.

The product is designed for legitimate commercial cross-border flows. It does not custody or issue virtual assets. It does not facilitate capital flight patterns or operations that would trigger the higher rate of IOF applicable to outbound capital flows. The architecture keeps foreign-exchange settlement entirely on regulated banking rails, consistent with the direction Brazilian regulators have signalled.

Gringo Coin operates as a customer-facing layer over IPS's infrastructure platform. The product itself is a mobile application that customers use to hold balances, execute conversions, send and receive payments, and view their transaction history. Behind the application, IPS's infrastructure modules orchestrate settlement, identity verification, AML monitoring, treasury reconciliation, and audit logging across the full transaction lifecycle.

All foreign exchange operations execute through a chartered Brazilian câmbio partner bank operating under Bacen authorisation. The câmbio partner performs the regulated FX leg of every cross-border operation, applies the standard retail rate of IOF (Imposto sobre Operações Financeiras), and issues the comprovante de câmbio that the customer receives as evidence of the operation. IPS provides the customer-facing experience and the infrastructure that orchestrates the operation; the câmbio partner performs the regulated activity.

Customer balances are held in fiat currency at all times. There is no virtual asset custody. There is no tokenisation of customer balances. The product does not require customers to hold or interact with virtual assets at any point in the customer journey. The distributed-ledger element of the architecture — specifically Hedera Consensus Service, used solely for tamper-evident audit logging — is internal infrastructure and not customer-facing.

Gringo Coin is structured as a customer-facing product within the correspondente cambial framework under CMN Resolução 4,935/2021. The partner câmbio bank holds Bacen authorisation for foreign exchange operations. IPS does not directly hold a câmbio licence and does not perform the regulated FX leg; the partner bank performs it. This is the same model serious Brazilian financial institutions use to operate cross-border flows through partner relationships.

The product involves no digital assets in the customer journey: IPS does not issue, custody, or transfer virtual assets on behalf of customers, and customer balances are held in fiat throughout. IPS does not operate as a Prestador de Serviços de Ativos Virtuais (PSAV) under Lei 14.478/2022 — see our regulatory approach.

Customer onboarding follows full KYC procedures including identity verification, document validation, and sanctions screening. Business customer onboarding adds KYB procedures including beneficial ownership verification through Brazilian corporate registries. Transaction monitoring is continuous, with patterns reviewed against AML and CFT obligations including those flowing through to COAF reporting requirements.

For a fuller description of IPS's regulatory framework, see the Compliance section.