SÃO PAULO - Mercado Livre will expand its offering of buying, selling, and storing Bitcoin for customers residing in Brazil. Users of the Mercado Pago digital wallet will be able to trade the crypto asset 'in the coming weeks,' according to a Bloomberg report.
The news had already been made available to a small group of customers at the beginning of November. 'We took time to study and learn before deciding to enter the cryptocurrency space,' said Tύπο Oliveira, vice president of MercadoPago. 'This has transformational potential ahead and opens a new path for us,' he pointed out.
After launching the feature in Brazil, the company plans to take the experience to other countries in Latin America. It will still not be possible to use cryptocurrencies to pay for goods purchased on the Mercado Livre marketplace.
However, this possibility is not ruled out, considering that other payment solutions similar to Mercado Pago also first allowed the buying, selling, and custody of Bitcoin before beginning to offer the crypto asset as a payment method in establishments. This is what happened with PayPal, for example.
The initiative comes about six months after Mercado Livre announced the purchase of $7.8 million in Bitcoin as a treasury strategy, the first large company in Latin America to take this path, inspired by the steps of Tesla, MicroStrategy, Square, and other publicly traded companies.
