Coinbase Expands to Brazil Supporting The Central Bank’s Payment System PIX

The Brazil­ian mar­ket wel­comes Coin­base, the lat­est glob­al cryp­to exchange to enter the coun­try, will­ing to com­pete with oth­er estab­lished giants, such as Binance, Mer­ca­do Pago, and Nubank, which have been oper­at­ing in Brazil for years and have a mas­sive num­ber of users. 

On March 21, Coin­base, the US-based cryp­tocur­ren­cy exchange, announced its expan­sion into Brazil through a series of updates that will stream­line user transactions. 

Accord­ing to the announce­ment, the company’s goal is to make cryp­tocur­ren­cies acces­si­ble to all Brazil­ians while ensur­ing the safe­ty of its clients’ assets. 

3/ To sup­port the UK’s goal to become a glob­al cryp­to hub, today we laid the out the key prin­ci­ples that we believe will help the inspir­ing ‘Glob­al Britain’ ambi­tion be real­ized. More here 👇https://t.co/QVBxYGfHu2

— Nana Muruge­san (@NanaMurugesan) March 15, 2023

Bem-Vindos, Coinbase 

To achieve its goals, Coin­base stat­ed that it is inte­grat­ing with Brazil’s instant pay­ment sys­tem, “Pix,” which has become the most wide­ly used by its cit­i­zens, accord­ing to the Brazil­ian Fed­er­a­tion of Banks (Febra­ban).

“First, we’ve made it sim­ple for you to top up and with­draw mon­ey from your Coin­base account using Brazil­ian Real, thanks to our inte­gra­tion with Pix, a well-known instant pay­ment plat­form cre­at­ed and man­aged by the Cen­tral Bank of Brazil.”

Pix is a pay­ment sys­tem that, in essence, offers a sim­i­lar user expe­ri­ence to that of a cryp­tocur­ren­cy trans­ac­tion. Peo­ple scan a QR code or get a “key” from the receiv­er and send mon­ey instant­ly and with no fees involved.

Addi­tion­al­ly, Coin­base part­nered with EBANX Pay­ments, a fin­tech com­pa­ny focused on help­ing glob­al mer­chants grow expo­nen­tial­ly through its pay­ment solu­tion, which allows busi­ness­es world­wide to trans­act safe­ly with Latin Amer­i­cans. Cur­rent­ly, EBANX process­es pay­ments for lead­ing mer­chants from over 50 coun­tries, includ­ing the US and China.

Sim­i­lar­ly, Coin­base announced that its trad­ing plat­form would be ful­ly adapt­ed to Brazil­ian Por­tuguese to pro­vide a bet­ter expe­ri­ence for its users. They will also offer chat sup­port in the native lan­guage that will oper­ate 24 hours a day. 

Brazil: The First Stop in a Long Journey

One of Coinbase’s main objec­tives is “to bring finan­cial free­dom to even more Brazil­ians through the cryp­toe­con­o­my.” To achieve this goal, Fabio Plein, who worked as the Coun­try Direc­tor of the exchange, will expand his role as Region­al Man­ag­ing Direc­tor to increase the firm’s rela­tion­ships in Brazil and Latin America. 

Accord­ing to Bloomberg, the company’s new launch in Brazil is part of the inter­na­tion­al expan­sion pro­gram it launched last week to expand into a max­i­mum of ten glob­al mar­kets, includ­ing the UK, Aus­tria, Sin­ga­pore, and Brazil, among others. 

Dur­ing an inter­view with Bloomberg Online, Nana Muruge­san, Coinbase’s Vice Pres­i­dent of Busi­ness Devel­op­ment and Inter­na­tion­al, said Coin­base can­not invest in all coun­tries simul­ta­ne­ous­ly, so they will deep­en their pres­ence in the cho­sen coun­tries before mov­ing on to new ones.

Muruge­san also empha­sized that the expan­sion into Brazil is tak­ing place due to the country’s impor­tance in terms of cryp­tocur­ren­cy adop­tion in Latin Amer­i­ca since the nation “is one of the first coun­tries on the cryp­tocur­ren­cy adop­tion index.” This reflects the enor­mous busi­ness oppor­tu­ni­ty they could have in the South Amer­i­can country.

Right now, Binance and Crypto.com are the two largest glob­al com­peti­tors to Coin­base, with reg­is­tered legal enti­ties in Brazil. The region­al exchanges include Mer­cado­Bit­coin, Novadax, Bis­coint, and some bro­kers that offer indi­rect expo­sure to cryp­to, includ­ing XP, Mer­cadopa­go, Itaú, 99Pay, and Nubank.