Uruguay Curated

DeFi Intel Research Desk2026-07-14Americas

Is crypto legal in Uruguay? (2026)

Yes — cryptocurrency is legal in Uruguay. Current status: Legal. Oversight sits with Banco Central del Uruguay (BCU) — via Superintendencia de Servicios Financieros (SSF). Full details — governing law, licensing, tax and dated enforcement history — follow below (last reviewed 2026-07-14).

Framework: Ley 20.345 (Regulación de Activos Virtuales), promulgated 19 September 2024; the BCU/SSF regulation setting the actual PSAV (virtual-asset service provider) licensing regime is still a draft — revised 16 March 2026 and, as of July 2026, not yet in force.

Uruguay brought virtual assets inside its regulated financial perimeter with Law 20.345, "Regulación de Activos Virtuales," passed by parliament on 10 September 2024, promulgated on 19 September 2024 and published in the Diario Oficial on 27 September 2024. The statute amends Uruguay's financial-system and anti-money-laundering framework to recognise virtual assets and to empower the Banco Central del Uruguay (BCU) — acting through its Superintendencia de Servicios Financieros (SSF) — to authorise and supervise Proveedores de Servicios de Activos Virtuales (PSAV). Importantly, the BCU's prudential reach extends only to PSAV whose services involve virtual assets that, in the regulator's assessment, qualify as financial instruments; activity that is purely non-financial sits under a lighter registration-and-AML regime rather than full authorisation.

The operative detail — capital, custody, governance and the licensing procedure itself — lives not in the law but in a BCU regulation that, as of July 2026, remains a draft. The SSF first released its PSAV normative project for public consultation on 21 August 2025 (comments to 19 September 2025), then published a substantially revised version on 16 March 2026 that folded in industry feedback and opened a second consultation window to 13 April 2026. Until that regulation is finalised and enters into force, no PSAV authorisation can actually be granted, so the "first authorisations expected 2025-2026" framing that circulated when the law passed has slipped: the licensing window opens only once the BCU issues the definitive text.

The Law 20.345 framework and the PSAV licensing regime

The draft regulation splits providers into two classes. Financial PSAV (PSAVF) — those offering exchange between virtual assets and fiat currency or between virtual assets, custody, transfer, or services tied to financial virtual-asset offerings — require prior SSF authorisation and must satisfy transparency, financial-consumer-protection, fund-segregation, cybersecurity, business-continuity and AML/CFT standards. Non-financial PSAV (PSAVNF) — the residual category of buying and selling virtual assets that are not financial in character — need only register in a public registry and focus on AML/CFT and counter-proliferation obligations rather than full prudential authorisation.

The revised March 2026 draft sets, for PSAV offering custody or administration, a minimum net worth of UI 1,000,000, a guarantee of at least UI 600,000 and a sight deposit with the BCU of at least UI 50,000 (UI = Unidad Indexada, Uruguay's inflation-indexed accounting unit; UI 1,000,000 is roughly US$120,000 in mid-2026). Earlier drafts had floated higher thresholds — around UI 1,500,000 of net worth and a UI 2,000,000 guarantee — and the numbers may move again before the rule is final, so the exact figures should be treated as provisional. The draft also requires that client virtual assets be segregated so they do not form part of a PSAV's insolvency estate, limits how long a PSAV may hold client fiat (a 48-hour cap in the draft), and obliges authorisation applicants to run internal controls, annual external audits, a designated compliance officer and — for token offerings — a white paper made available in Spanish or English.

For firms already trading when the regulation takes effect, the revised draft grants a transition: authorisation requests may be filed up to 31 December 2026, with a general compliance deadline of 30 June 2027, and operators may continue working while their application is processed. The August 2025 draft had originally proposed a single 30 June 2026 cut-off; because the regulation stayed in consultation past that date and never entered into force, that earlier deadline was overtaken and pushed back. Any operator planning to serve the Uruguayan market should therefore watch the SSF's normative pages for the final text and the actual opening of the authorisation window.

Tax treatment

Uruguay taxed crypto before it regulated the providers, and Law 20.345 did not change the tax rules. Under Uruguay's territorial system, tax generally falls on Uruguayan-source income, and the Dirección General Impositiva (DGI) fits crypto gains into the existing income-tax categories rather than a bespoke crypto tax. For individuals, gains on the sale of virtual assets are treated as capital income under IRPF (Impuesto a la Renta de las Personas Físicas), Category I, taxed at 12%. For companies that deal in crypto as a business activity — exchange, custody, mining and related services — gains fall under IRAE (Impuesto a las Rentas de las Actividades Económicas) at 25%. There is no holding-period discount or exemption. For IRAE and net-wealth (Impuesto al Patrimonio) purposes, crypto is treated as an intangible asset carried at acquisition cost, with no revaluation or depreciation; assets held abroad and unconnected to Uruguayan business activity generally sit outside the wealth tax under the territorial principle.

• Capital-gains rate (individuals): 12% — IRPF Category I capital income
• Corporate / business rate: 25% — IRAE, where crypto is a regular business activity
• Holding-period rule: none — no reduction or exemption
• Basis: territorial system; crypto treated as an intangible carried at acquisition cost

Travel rule applicability

Status: being implemented via the PSAV AML framework — exact numeric threshold pending verification. Uruguay is a member of GAFILAT, the FATF-style regional body for South America, and Law 20.345 folds PSAV into the anti-money-laundering perimeter: providers must register with the Unidad de Información y Análisis Financiero (UIAF) as reporting entities and apply customer due diligence, beneficiary identification, transaction monitoring and suspicious-transaction reporting. The draft BCU regulation is expressly built on FATF/GAFI recommendations, which include Recommendation 16 — the "travel rule" requiring originator and beneficiary information to accompany virtual-asset transfers. The precise travel-rule mechanics and any de-minimis threshold will be fixed when the BCU issues the definitive PSAV text; until then the exact threshold is pending verification. (A specific "USD/EUR 1,000" figure asserted on the earlier version of this profile could not be traced to a Uruguayan source and has been removed.)

Notable enforcement and regulatory events

• July 2022. Before any crypto statute existed, the BCU's SSF moved against Binance, opening administrative proceedings and warning it to stop advertising crypto to the Uruguayan public as an "investment with savings characteristics" — soliciting savings from the public is reserved to authorised financial-intermediation institutions and registered securities issuers.
• 6 July 2023. The BCU issued a public alert that InBierto, which solicited crypto investment through automated online platforms while promising returns, was not registered with the SSF and was not authorised to raise investment from the public.
• 19 September 2024. Law 20.345 is promulgated (published in the Diario Oficial on 27 September 2024), giving the BCU statutory authority over PSAV for the first time.
• 21 August 2025. The SSF publishes its PSAV normative project and opens public consultation, with comments accepted to 19 September 2025.
• 16 March 2026. The SSF publishes a revised PSAV project incorporating consultation feedback and opens a second consultation to 13 April 2026; as of July 2026 the regulation has not yet entered into force.

Public licensed CASP list

Uruguay does not yet publish a licensed-PSAV register, because the licensing regulation is still in draft and no PSAV authorisation has been granted. Once the BCU/SSF finalises the PSAV rules and begins issuing authorisations to financial PSAV — and, separately, populating the public registry for non-financial PSAV — DeFi Intel will mirror the official register on a quarterly basis, as it does for jurisdictions such as the EU (ESMA MiCA registers), South Africa (FSCA) and Singapore (MAS). In the meantime, submit known Uruguay PSAVs to [email protected] and monitor the SSF's authorisation and registry pages.

Comparison to neighbours

Compare Uruguay crypto regulation with three regional jurisdictions:

Doing business in Uruguay — practical notes

A BCU PSAV authorisation cannot be obtained yet — the regulation that creates the procedure is still in consultation — but the shape of the regime is now clear enough to plan around. Providers dealing in financial virtual assets should budget for SSF authorisation and the draft capital requirements (net worth around UI 1,000,000 for custody or administration, plus a UI 600,000 guarantee and a UI 50,000 sight deposit, all subject to change), client-asset segregation, the 48-hour cap on holding client fiat, and full AML/CFT registration with the UIAF; purely non-financial buy-sell operators face the lighter registration-plus-AML regime. Fiat-backed stablecoins are not treated as a new asset class: a token backed 100% by a single fiat currency through deposits in local financial institutions and paying no interest is regulated as electronic money under the existing payment-system law (Ley 19.210), and the BCU's 2026-2030 agenda flags integrating stable virtual assets into the national payment system. Tax (12% IRPF for individuals, 25% IRAE for businesses) and UIAF anti-money-laundering obligations already apply regardless of licensing status. Watch the SSF's normative pages for the final PSAV text and the opening of the authorisation window — under the current draft, transition requests run to 31 December 2026 and general compliance to 30 June 2027.

Methodology and sources

This profile was researched and updated by DeFi Intel's research desk on 2026-07-14 from the primary and secondary sources listed below, including the text of Law 20.345, the BCU/SSF normative project and communiqués, Uruguayan tax-practice guidance and contemporaneous reporting of the BCU's enforcement actions. Because the PSAV licensing regulation is still a draft, figures such as capital thresholds and transition dates are provisional and are marked as such; claims that could not be verified against a source are omitted or marked pending. We do not republish unverified third-party datasets. Submit corrections and primary-source links to [email protected].

Sources

• Presidencia de la República — Ley N° 20.345, 19/09/2024, "Se regulan los activos virtuales"
• IMPO — Ley N° 20.345 (texto original)
• Banco Central del Uruguay — Marco conceptual para el tratamiento de Activos Virtuales en Uruguay (classification, stablecoins as e-money)
• BCU / SSF — Comunicado Proyecto Normativo PSAV, 21 August 2025 (public consultation)
• RSM Uruguay — Uruguay avanza en la regulación de los PSAV (PSAVF vs PSAVNF, June 2026 transition)
• Sociedad Uruguaya — 10 claves del nuevo proyecto normativo (revised project, 16 March 2026)
• Ecosistema Startup — Regulación cripto Uruguay: mínimos en UI (capital, guarantee, deposit)
• RSM Uruguay — Criptomonedas en Uruguay: claves del tratamiento fiscal en 2025 (IRPF 12% / IRAE 25%)
• Echeverría y Asociados — Criptomonedas en Uruguay 2025: regulación, impuestos y uso legal
• Bloomberg Línea — Binance en la mira del BCU (29 July 2022)
• Montevideo Portal — BCU emite alerta por InBierto, firma no autorizada (6 July 2023)
• FATF — Recommendation 16 (the travel rule) update, June 2025
• Cointelegraph via TradingView — BCU plans to integrate stablecoins into the payment system by 2030