Latin American Crypto Firm Ripio
Launches Prepaid Crypto Card in Brazil
Payments can be made in any of 28
different cryptocurrencies, and the debit card also offers 5% cashback rewards
in bitcoin. Ripio hopes to issue 250,000 crypto debit cards in Brazil by the
end of the year.
Source: COINDESK
Latin American crypto company Ripio
has started rolling out a prepaid debit card in Brazil that allows payments to
be made in cryptocurrency and earns cashback rewards in bitcoin, Ripio CEO
Sebastian Serrano told CoinDesk.
The company hopes to release 250,000
cards, which were developed in partnership with Visa (V), by the end of the
year, offering the product to the one million users it has in the South
American country, the company said, adding that the digital version of the card
is already available.
The card will allow payments using
Brazilian reals and the 28 cryptocurrencies Ripio has listed on its platform,
the company said. Serrano said Ripio is considering adding rewards in
cryptocurrencies other than bitcoin (BTC).
The company also plans to launch the
card in Argentina later this year, Serrano said, and is not ruling out rolling
it out in other countries where the firm operates, such as Uruguay, Colombia,
Mexico and Spain.
Ripio’s latest projects and plans
In Brazil, Ripio currently operates
under its own brand and that of BitcoinTrade, a crypto exchange it acquired in
January 2021, which had 300,000 users at the time of the acquisition. By the
end of 2022, BitcoinTrade will be renamed Ripio, Serrano added.
In Brazil, Ripio recently worked on
the development of Mercado Coin, a cryptocurrency launched last week by Mercado
Libre (MELI), Latin America's largest e-commerce company by market cap. Ripio
also provides the custody and trading service of Mercado Coin in Mercado Pago,
Mercado Libre's digital wallet.
“This is the first large
tokenization project and the first very large company in Latin America to
integrate crypto, but we also believe that this is something that is going to
become much more widespread and we want to be catalysts for the future,”
Serrano said.
Ripio has also built a
business-to-business team to provide white-label crypto products for other
firms in the region. And in July, Ripio launched a Web3 wallet called Ripio
Portal, which allows users to connect to decentralized applications and
decentralized finance (DeFi) protocols, as well as collect non-fungible tokens
(NFT).
Last September, the company raised
$50 million in a Series B funding round led by blockchain investment firm
Digital Currency Group (DCG). DCG owns CoinDesk as an independent subsidiary.
Serrano said Ripio has no plans to
raise new capital during 2022, said Serrano, who added that the company did not
have any layoffs in 2022, but did slow its hiring pace starting in November.
Ripio currently has 3.5 million
users across Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, Colombia, Mexico and Spain, according
to Serrano. The company plans to start operations in Chile before the end of
2022, and to open offices in Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay next year, he
added.
Serrano said Ripio is not ruling
strategic acquisitions to accelerate its growth in Latin America, although he
declined to give additional details.
Brazilian exchange Mercado Bitcoin
leads the local market, with 3.8 million users. But this year, Latin American
crypto exchange Bitso and fintech players Mercado Libre and Nubank announced
they had each surpassed one million crypto users in Brazil.