October 19, 2026
The Hardest Pix Key to Remember Is the Most Registered One
Random keys are 52.3% of Pix keys, but the data doesn't show preference: each person holds about six keys on average, and only three types are limited.
Nobody memorizes a random Pix key, a meaningless string of letters and numbers, and yet it is the most registered type: 526.8 million of the 1.008 billion keys, or 52.3%, according to Tecnoblog with data from the Central Bank.
Looking at these numbers alone, we might think that, being the most registered, it must be the public's favorite. Is it?
The Central Bank requires the receiver's app to generate a QR Code from any key type and the payer's app to show the full name and masked CPF before confirmation. So the payer doesn't need to keep the key in their head. It arrives through the QR Code or copy and paste, and the screen shows who will receive the money. A key nobody needs to remember can be as unreadable as it likes.
Also, CPF, phone number and email each work for only one account. A person with one CPF, one phone number and one email (or several, if they have more than one) exhausts those types, and anything beyond that can only be random. Doing a quick calculation, if we divide Tecnoblog's table by the roughly 170 million users, we get 5.9 keys per user. Of those, 2.7 are CPF, phone and email, close to what each person has available to register, 3.1 are random and 0.1 is CNPJ.
That's why data analysis needs to be careful. You have to read the data, understand the process, the limitations and the motivation behind the result. An isolated number misleads: the 52.3% is a slice of keys, and each user holds, on average, about six.
Sources: Tecnoblog · Agência Brasil · Banco Central (Minimum Requirements for User Experience, v7.3) · Banco Central (Pix Management Report 2021-2022)