Mercado Pago, the digital banking arm of Argentine e-commerce giant Mercado Libre (MELI), is rolling out a stablecoin in Brazil, pegged to the U.S. dollar.
The initiative puts Mercado Libre, Latin America’s largest company, at the forefront of the region’s growing crypto market.
The company stated that Brazilian users of Mercado Pago will be able to buy and sell the Meli Dollar stablecoin using their account balances in Brazilian reais without any transaction fees.
This development follows Mercado Libre’s August 2022 launch of Mercado Coin, a cryptocurrency that allows users to make purchases on the platform and receive cashback. Prior to this, the company integrated Paxos’ blockchain infrastructure into Mercado Pago, enabling Brazilian users to trade and hold bitcoin, ether, and Paxos’ stablecoin, USDP.
Mercado Pago’s stablecoin transactions will be facilitated by Ripio, a Latin American cryptocurrency company that runs a trading platform and digital wallet. Ripio had previously worked with Mercado Pago on the development of Mercado Coin.
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Mercado Pago also partnered with US stablecoin issuer Circle to enable more than 2 million users in the country to access and use the USDC stablecoin for payments and savings.
Mercado Pago, reportedly the largest online payment platform in Latin America, initially launched its crypto trading service in December 2021 in Brazil. Further, in November 2022, it entered the Mexican market, where it says the first month of operation brought as many as 150 thousand users to the app.
Now, Mercado Pago is looking for a similar bump in Chile as the e-commerce platform proceeds with its gradual rollout in what the company’s President Osvaldo Gimenez calls “aggressive growth”.
The move comes months after Coinbase laid out its strategy to build a tech hub in Latin America. Following this acquisition, Coinbase’s next steps will be to expand outside of Brazil, hopefully finding acquisitions in Chile, Colombia, Mexico and Argentina.
