Bro: Pay Any Bill in Brazil with Bitcoin
Who's Bro?
Bro is an open, peer-to-peer protocol for paying real-world bills with bitcoin, built by Carol Souza, who co-founded Area Bitcoin, the largest bitcoin-only school in South America. After years of teaching thousands of Brazilians about bitcoin, she built Bro to make it useful for paying their monthly bills.
Bro leverages the payment rails Brazilians already use. Users scan a PIX code or a boleto, pay in sats, and a community provider pays the bill in reais and uploads proof. Providers earn a 3% fee and buy bitcoin without going through an exchange. Bro already works with PIX, boletos and TED in Brazil, plus CoDi in Mexico, PromptPay in Thailand, and local rails in Argentina and Colombia.
The Challenge
PIX is the central bank's payment system that carried 54.7% of all Brazilian payment transactions in the second half of 2025. But until Bro, paying a PIX bill with bitcoin has meant going through an exchange first: open an account, pass KYC, sell bitcoin, wait, withdraw reais, then pay. On Mercado Bitcoin, the withdrawal by PIX alone costs 1.99% plus R$2.90. And since May 2026, Brazilian exchanges must identify the owners of the personal wallets they send to.
Running a custodial wallet would turn Bro into exactly the kind of intermediary it's aiming to remove. Their users are people looking for a simple wallet with instant payments, and keys they control.
The Solution
Bro integrated the Breez SDK directly into its app. The result is a single app with a payments engine subtly mediating between the user's bill and the provider who pays it, invisible to everyone except the engineering team.
For users:
- Speed: Scan the boleto, and once the provider uploads proof that the bill is paid, the app settles with them in seconds.
- Control: Users' keys are generated locally and never leave their phones. No sats move until the bill is paid, and Bro never holds users' funds.
- Convenience: Bro's Lightning addresses are based on users' phone numbers or email addresses, and they can receive even while the app is closed.
"Bro emerged from a personal need to become a freedom tech for all Brazilians and people in other regions."
Carol Souza, Co-founder of Area Bitcoin
For developers:
The Breez SDK was in Bro's very first commit, and the app went from first commit to first release in seven weeks. The Breez SDK's Flutter bindings handle creating and paying invoices, claiming on-chain deposits, payment events, and Lightning addresses. One seed on the device covers both the user's Nostr identity and their wallet. There are no nodes, no channels, and no liquidity to manage, so the Bro team could devote their time to perfecting their protocol: order matching over Nostr, encrypted proofs, and open coordinators anyone can run.
For growth:
Bro is live on Android, in testing on iOS, and working across five countries' payment rails. Every provider who joins makes bills payable in sats for everyone nearby, and every user arrives with a non-custodial wallet already in their pocket.
In Brazil, bitcoin's best argument was never the price. It's paying the electricity bill without asking anyone's permission.
Ready to Get Started?
Join Bro and the world's best builders adding instant, non-custodial bitcoin and stablecoins with the Breez SDK.