Brazil’s largest bitcoin exchange, Mercado Bitcoin, has announced plans to expand across Latin America.
The chairman of the board, Reinaldo Rabelo, named Chile, Mexico and Argentina as the countries into which he would expand first and compared the “regulatory culture” in these countries with that of Brazil.
Mexico is currently the fourth largest Latin American country by peer-to-peer Bitcoin trading volume, according to Useful Tulips, with Chile in fifth place and Argentina in seventh place.
The strong P2P trading volume suggests that local traders may have significant demand that is not being met by centralized platforms.
The announcement comes along with news of an investment round in which Mercado Bitcoin raised nearly $ 38 million from venture capital firms such as Parallax Ventures, Evora Fund and Banco Plural.
Mercado Bitcoin will use part of the funds to invest in the regulated custodian Bitrust to serve institutional investors. The exchange will also invest in the Meubank digital wallet, which customers can use to store crypto assets, gaming collectibles, and other digital assets.
After consolidating its ecosystem, Mercado Bitcoin aims to become one of the world’s leading exchanges with Rabelo.
“We want to develop the crypto ecosystem in Brazil and create a market that is as developed as that of the USA. We also want to be one of the five largest digital exchanges in the world. “
“Our long-term goal is to participate in building a new infrastructure for the financial market based on blockchain, smart contracts and crypto-assets,” he added.
Although the exchange is one of the top stock exchanges in Latin America by volume and has traded more than $ 3.7 billion since it was launched in 2013, it has operated almost entirely in Brazil. The platform’s user base has doubled from around one million to 2.2 million in the past two years.
The exchange aims to exceed a user base of 3 million and expand its team from 200 to 300 in 2021.