E‑commerce Giant MercadoLibre Launches its Own Cryptocurrency MercadoCoin in Brazil

On August 18, Mer­cadoLibre Inc, a multi­na­tion­al e‑commerce com­pa­ny based in Latin Amer­i­ca, announced the cre­ation of a new cryp­tocur­ren­cy called Mer­cado­Coin, which will be imple­ment­ed in its loy­al­ty program.

As report­ed by Reuters, the cryp­tocur­ren­cy will run on the Ethereum net­work as an ERC-20 token priced at $0.10 each. It will be used pri­mar­i­ly for cash­back and pur­chas­es inside MercadoLibre’s plat­form. The devel­op­er team also hint­ed at open­ing the token to the sec­ondary mar­ket at some point, but did not elab­o­rate on the idea:

“MercadoLibre’s cryp­tocur­ren­cy will be ini­tial­ly val­ued at $0.10 apiece before being open to mar­ket fluctuation.”

MercadoCoin Will Be Available In 80 Million Accounts

Start­ing August 18, the cryp­tocur­ren­cy will be avail­able to more than 500,000 users in Brazil; how­ev­er, the team expects to make it avail­able to at least 80 mil­lion cus­tomers by the end of the month.

For now, the com­pa­ny has no plans to launch in oth­er regions, as it would be chal­leng­ing to com­ply with all the dif­fer­ent reg­u­la­to­ry pro­ce­dures nec­es­sary to oper­ate in oth­er coun­tries. This is of the utmost impor­tance, con­sid­er­ing how dif­fer­ent the pol­i­tics toward cryp­to in Latin Amer­i­ca are. Coun­tries like El Sal­vador, Brazil, and Venezuela are more cryp­to-friend­ly, but oth­ers like Bolivia, Ecuador, or Chile have the oppo­site stance.

Mar­cos Galperin, CEO and founder of Mer­cadoLibre, said via his offi­cial Twit­ter account that this new ini­tia­tive would boost the company’s loy­al­ty pro­gram and help “democ­ra­tize finan­cial inclu­sion in Latin America.”

Hoy lan­zamos Mer­ca­do Coin en Brasil, dán­dole may­or impul­so a nue­stro pro­gra­ma de leal­tad y dan­do otro paso para democ­ra­ti­zar la inclusión financiera en Améri­ca Latina.

Mer­cadoLibre to cre­ate cryp­tocur­ren­cy as part of loy­al­ty pro­gram https://t.co/7kanuk6GLh

— Mar­cos Galperin (@marcos_galperin) August 18, 2022

Mercadolibre Keeps Betting on the Cryptocurrency Market

As report­ed by Cryp­toPota­to, Mer­cadoLibre made its entry into the world of cryp­tocur­ren­cies last year when it launched a wal­let to allow Brazil­ian users to buy and sell cryp­tocur­ren­cies such as Bit­coin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH), and Teth­er (USDT).

How­ev­er, ear­li­er this week, Osval­do Gimenez, CEO of Mer­ca­do Pago, said that they would expand this ser­vice to the entire Region allow­ing all users to store, sell or buy cryp­tocur­ren­cies with­out need­ing third-par­ty banks, exchanges, or brokers.

“We will be expand­ing in the Region the pos­si­bil­i­ty to buy, sell and have cryp­tocur­ren­cies in your account. It works with Bit­coin, Ethereum and sta­ble cur­ren­cy that reflects the val­ue of the dollar.”

Accord­ing to Gimenez, using cryp­tocur­ren­cies through Mer­cadoPa­go will have a mean­ing­ful impact in the Region, as many peo­ple are unbanked or use them main­ly to with­draw cash, so this is an “invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ty” for those look­ing for an alter­na­tive to fiat money.

“It is an alter­na­tive invest­ment oppor­tu­ni­ty that we find very inter­est­ing and gen­er­ates a lot of inter­est from users. At a time when the dol­lar has been appre­ci­at­ing, the invest­ments that users have with us are small and for us it’s one more way to diver­si­fy their portfolio.”

Besides Mer­cado­Coin, and the cryp­to wal­let, Mer­cadolibre has also invest­ed in Bit­coin as a com­pa­ny, is a strate­gic investor in Pax­os and one of Brazil’s largest cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchanges, and was one of the mem­bers of the now defunct Libra Asso­ci­a­tion via its fin­tech branch, MercadoPago.