Twelve years after launching as a cryptocurrency trade, Mercado Bitcoin goals to be one thing fully completely different.
Much less centered on worth charts and buying and selling pairs, the São Paulo-based firm now talks extra about Brazil’s central financial institution’s PIX funds, digital mounted revenue, and streamlined remittances.
Mercado Bitcoin’s head of company growth, Daniel Cunha, informed CoinDesk in an interview on the sidelines of the trade’s DAC 2025 conference that the agency desires to turn out to be the app the place Brazilians handle their monetary lives. A type of “tremendous app” for spending, saving, and investing.
But, calling MB a “tremendous app” could not fairly seize the essence of the technique. Its management prefers a special time period: a monetary hub that blends legacy finance with blockchain, letting customers faucet into each while not having to perceive both.
“The revolution occurs when the protocol disappears,” Cunha informed CoinDesk. “The shopper doesn’t need to hear about blockchains and tokens. They need to know the speed, the chance, and the maturity date,” he stated, referring to the trade’s tokenized mounted revenue choices.
‘Invisible blockchain’
That considering has reshaped how MB presents itself to customers. As an alternative of relying on crypto-native vocabulary, the corporate now emphasizes options in its providing. One main change concerned scrapping the time period “tokenization” in user-facing supplies altogether, Cunha stated.
“We tried a ton of variations,” Cunha stated. “After we stopped saying ‘token’ and began saying ‘digital mounted revenue,’ issues took off.” The concept is to have a product whose backend is powered by blockchain know-how, however the frontend stays extra recognizable to the lots.
Primarily, MB’s guess is that “invisible blockchain” is the subsequent frontier.
“We’re going to see lots of people use blockchain with out realizing they’re utilizing blockchain,” MB stated. “That’s when you realize the revolution has occurred.”
The agency’s flagship blockchain-based funding merchandise focus on tokenized personal credit score, a section it believes is underserved and ripe for disruption in Brazil.
Brazil ranks among the many prime 5 international locations for retail crypto utilization, in accordance to Chainalysis’ Global Crypto Adoption Index. MB is positioning itself as a solution to a ache level widespread within the nation by a stablecoin-based remittance service.
A pivot from buying and selling
Regardless of all the brand new initiatives, MB’s core enterprise, crypto buying and selling, nonetheless accounts for almost all of its income. However that stability is shifting.
At its peak, buying and selling made up 95% of the agency’s revenue. Right now, that quantity is nearer to 60%, with the remaining coming from funds, custody, tokenized investments, and providers like asset administration. Over time, the corporate expects buying and selling to fall under 30%, Cunha revealed.
As a part of that shift, the agency can also be increasing geographically. It now has a client-facing operation in Portugal and is constructing institutional channels within the U.S., aiming to hyperlink capital and funding alternatives throughout markets.
Mercado Bitcoin, the place a good portion of belongings below administration are made up of small and medium enterprises’ treasuries, expects to surpass 3 billion reais ($563 million) in tokenized credit score issuance by year-end. About 20% of belongings below custody on the platform are actually tokenized real-world belongings (RWAs), up from just about zero only a few years in the past.
The pivot sits inside a wider push to construct “monetary tremendous apps.” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has stated Coinbase goals to be a crypto-powered “super app” that would supply “all varieties of monetary providers.”
Past crypto, fintechs corresponding to Revolut and Paytm are bundling funds, lending and investing. The playbook borrows from WeChat and Alipay, apps that bundle social, monetary, and different options.
Learn extra: Crypto Exchange Mercado Bitcoin to Tokenize $200M in Real-World Assets on XRP Ledger
