Brazilian digital bank Nubank and payments giant Mercado Pago temporarily froze key cryptocurrency transfer paths on Friday, November 6, 2026, after external screening and data providers suffered instability. The outages affected deposits, withdrawals, and some external wallet transfers, while in-app buying and selling remained operational.
Nubank told users that crypto withdrawals and deposits were unavailable due to “instability in an external data provider,” and said the problem was not in its own systems. Customer assets and data remained protected, but transfers would only resume after the supplier’s service recovered. Mercado Pago separately described an incident at a risk-monitoring and anti-money-laundering provider. It blocked some outbound transfers to external wallets as a protective measure and warned inbound deposits could be delayed, while spot buy and sell continued without impact.
The freeze highlighted a structural dependency: retail crypto in regulated banking and payments apps relies on third-party rails for address risk scoring, sanctions screening, AML monitoring, and transaction verification. When those feeds fail, platforms can still price trades internally but choose to halt deposits and self-custody exits rather than allow unscreened flows.
Neither company named the vendor, and it remains unclear whether both firms were affected by the same provider or parallel failures. Public custody labels were separate from the outage claim: Veja noted Fireblocks as Nubank’s stated crypto custodian and Paxos as Mercado Pago’s. Those names describe where assets sit, not which screening hop failed.
