In Brazil, almost everyone pays for almost everything with Pix: money leaves one bank account and lands in another within seconds, at any hour of the day. DePix takes that same real and moves it out of the bank and onto a network built on top of Bitcoin — the Liquid Network — where it can sit in a wallet that only its owner controls. This post looks at how that works under the hood, who is behind the asset, how it evolved, and what people do with it today.

What DePix is and how it works on Liquid

DePix is a payment token whose purpose is to reflect the value of one unit of Brazilian real¹ — the real-denominated stablecoin that circulates as a native asset on the Liquid Network, the Bitcoin sidechain operated by a federation of companies.² Its issuer is Eulen,³ which the asset’s terms of use make responsible for issuing, managing and redeeming DePix; issuance and burn happen directly with the issuer, while end users reach DePix through Node Operators — independent entities that connect them through their own applications.¹ Those same terms are explicit about what DePix is not: not a bank deposit, a security, an investment contract, a credit instrument or legal tender; it pays no interest, yield or dividend; and it carries no deposit-insurance or central-bank guarantee.¹ On-chain, the asset is registered in the Liquid asset registry as “Decentralized Pix”, ticker DePix, with eight decimal places; its issuance transaction was confirmed on 14 February 2024.⁴

In January 2026 Eulen itself went from participant to operator on Liquid, joining the Liquid Federation — the members that run the infrastructure securing the network and its two-way peg with Bitcoin — as one of seven new companies.⁵ The same announcement described Eulen as enabling permissionless cross-border remittances across Latin America with DePix, serving more than 100,000 unique monthly users through a P2P network of OTC desks.⁶

The way in and out is Pix, the instant payment system created and run by the Central Bank of Brazil, live since November 2020 and available around the clock.⁷ In practice, as the asset’s own site describes it, a Pix sent from a bank to a partner operator in the network brings DePix directly to the sender’s wallet — nobody else holds the funds; converting back to reais runs the other way, from DePix to Pix through independent entities.⁸ The issuer does not sell to the public: DePix is sold exclusively through independent entities.⁸

What Liquid adds to this design is what makes it a good home for a digital real:²

  • One-minute blocks, finality in two. A Liquid transaction is considered final after two confirmations — about two minutes.
  • Confidential Transactions by default. Amounts and the asset type are hidden from anyone watching the chain; only sender and receiver know them. For everyday money that matters: a balance and what it pays for do not become public data.
  • Small fees, paid in LBTC. Network fees are paid in LBTC only,⁹ and the documentation sets the minimum at 0.1 satoshi per vByte¹⁰ — cheap enough for a payment the size of a coffee, or of an API call.
  • Issued assets are native. DePix is not a smart contract running on top of the chain: it is a Liquid asset in its own right, handled by wallets the same way LBTC and USDt are.

The trade-off has to be stated. Liquid is operated by a federation of members who take turns signing blocks,² which makes it more centralized than Bitcoin’s main chain. And DePix is an issued asset, with the caveats its Terms of Use spell out: the issuer does not guarantee that DePix will maintain exact parity with its reference value in any market, nor that a redemption will be processed within a specific timeframe, and whoever acquires the token declares no expectation of profit, yield or appreciation.¹ Which is why there is a clear line for its users: Bitcoin to save, DePix to spend .

The DePix evolution

In a little over two and a half years, DePix went from a niche P2P use case to massive adoption with several use cases. Four stages mark that path, and the secret to this growth is the ethos that inspires bitcoiners at Eulen: enabling individual sovereignty, privacy, decentralization and innovation.

1. P2P: the bridge between the real and bitcoin. Eulen announced DePix in January 2024 as a bridge between the traditional financial system and digital assets — in the issuer’s description, a simpler entry point from the fiat world into the digital one;¹¹ the issuance transaction on Liquid was confirmed that February.⁴ The first users were P2P and OTC desks: people buying bitcoin and USDt with DePix in the middle, as the step between the real and bitcoin. The asset’s own site still points to that network of authorized P2P operators as the place to buy DePix with reais.⁸

2. Crypto gateway platforms. On top of that rail, the P2P operators built gateway platforms serving not only people buying and selling bitcoin but also businesses that want to receive their sales directly in digital tokens: the customer pays in reais through Pix, and the business receives DePix in its own wallet. This is what carried DePix into mass adoption — the gateways served merchants moving hundreds of thousands of transactions a month on Liquid. The scale shows up in third-party numbers: in its report for the first quarter of 2026, the Liquid Federation attributed roughly half of all network transaction volume to DePix,¹² in a quarter that closed at 1,163,119 transactions — nearly five times the same quarter of 2025 — and tied that share to remittance and merchant-payment flows across Brazil.¹³

3. A non-custodial payment account for people and businesses. Some of those operators went further and built apps with everything integrated. On the DePix App, for example, the user reaches an integrated Liquid wallet , atomic swaps, cross-chain stablecoin swaps, Lightning invoices, a gift-card shop, the on- and off-ramp between reais and Liquid assets over Pix, and the whole merchant toolkit,¹⁴ described in the section The DePix App: a non-custodial payment account . That is the new paradigm: a non-custodial payment account, on Liquid mainnet since March 2026.¹⁵

4. The same non-custodial payment account, for AI agents. Most recently, the DePix App went even further still and launched an MCP server through which an AI agent holds and operates an account of its own — signing on its operator’s machine, under limits a human sets.¹⁵ The last section describes how that connection works.

Use cases

The DePix App’s own blog documents the everyday cases, each a practical guide with the costs and the limits of that path:

The DePix App: a non-custodial payment account

Among the operators building on DePix, the DePix App turned the rail into a payment account — a strictly non-custodial one. It holds nothing on a user’s behalf: funds sit in the user’s own Liquid wallet, the keys are the user’s, and the server never holds keys or funds. In its own words, the API returns Pix QR codes and Liquid addresses, and all signing happens client-side.¹⁴

For a business, the account does the work of a payment gateway: the customer pays an ordinary Pix and the merchant receives DePix directly in their own wallet.¹⁴ The server generates the QR and watches settlement; there is no custodied balance anywhere to freeze or lose, and on the receiving side a bank account never enters the equation.

On top of that mechanism, the account brings together what a business expects: one-off checkouts, reusable payment links that can appear on a public storefront, dated charges with due dates and optional late fees and interest, and HMAC-signed webhooks so a merchant’s system reacts to payments instead of polling.¹⁴ Besides Pix, a merchant can also be paid in DePix directly, wallet-to-wallet on Liquid, with settlement observed on-chain.¹⁴

Every Pix received passes through an anti-fraud window, shown before payment, before the DePix is released. By the DePix App’s own reporting, it has processed roughly R$ 1 million in Pix for more than 2,000 users since March 2026 on Liquid mainnet.¹⁵

How AI agents connect

The most recent thing to grow on top of DePix is an account an AI agent can hold and operate on its own. The bridge is the Model Context Protocol (MCP), the open standard that lets assistants such as Claude and ChatGPT use external tools.¹⁶ The DePix App publishes an open-source MCP server for exactly this,¹⁷ and it comes two ways. What separates them is not the product — it is who holds the wallet’s seed.

Hosted. The assistant points at a server the DePix App runs. It is enough to receive money — create and read charges, follow payments — and it holds nothing: no key, no seed, no funds. By design it cannot sign a transaction or move money, because the wallet code is not part of that deployment at all.¹⁷

Local. The same software runs on the operator’s own machine and adds a full non-custodial Liquid wallet: balances and addresses, sending and receiving, conversion between DePix, LBTC and USDt, and Lightning in and out. It signs inside that process, with a seed created there that never leaves the machine. There is no remote-signing path — which is exactly why the hosted server cannot offer a wallet without becoming a custodian, and does not.¹⁷

The part worth dwelling on: an agent can open its own account, with nobody clicking through a dashboard. A human does two things once — creates the wallet in a terminal, where the recovery words are shown once and the seed never passes through the model, and sets the spending limits — and then authorizes the agent. From there the agent registers its own account and takes it live, signing on the operator’s machine the whole time.

The safety model is short. The seed is created and re-read only in terminal ceremonies; no tool can export it. API keys live encrypted on the machine and are never shown to the model. The spending limits belong to the human — a cap per transaction and a rolling daily cap that no tool call can raise; changing them means editing the configuration by hand. And the wallet does not depend on Pix: it can be funded with LBTC or USDt, or over Lightning, from anywhere in the world — DePix is simply what opens the Pix door to Brazilian bank accounts.

The limits guard against mistakes and against malicious instructions buried in some text an agent reads; against someone with access to the machine itself, the real defense is to keep in this wallet only what one would be comfortable losing. For how to connect an agent and try it, see depixapp.com/ai ; the longer story of why an agent should have a wallet of its own is in an AI agent wallet on Liquid .

A digital real, at home on Liquid

Why Liquid for a stablecoin like this: a transaction is final in about two minutes, amounts are confidential by default, and fees are small enough for payments the size an agent makes — all in an asset that, being native to the network, any Liquid wallet understands.² It is a network run by a federation, with the trade-off that implies. For a digital real that needs to settle fast, stay private, and talk to Bitcoin, it has proven a sound home — and, lately, one an autonomous agent can hold an account on.

References

  1. DePix — Terms of Use (depix.info)
  2. Liquid Network — Technical Overview (Blockstream)
  3. Eulen — company site
  4. Liquid explorer — DePix asset (registry and issuance)
  5. Liquid Welcomes Seven New Bitcoin-Native Companies to the Federation (blog.liquid.net)
  6. Eulen Joins the Liquid Federation — Eulen blog, January 2026
  7. Central Bank of Brazil — Pix
  8. DePix — official asset site (depix.info)
  9. Liquid Assets — fees are paid in LBTC (docs.liquid.net)
  10. Liquid Features & Benefits — transaction fees (docs.liquid.net)
  11. Eulen Launches DePix — Eulen blog, January 2024
  12. DePix Accounts for Roughly Half of Liquid Network Volume — Eulen blog, May 2026
  13. Liquid Federation Quarterly Update — Q1 2026 (blog.liquid.net)
  14. DePix App — agent index and API summary (llms.txt)
  15. DePix App for AI agents (numbers and connection)
  16. Model Context Protocol — official documentation
  17. @depixapp/mcp — README and source code (GitHub, Apache-2.0)