- Mercado Bitcoin is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in Latin America.
- It has been told by Brazil’s securities regulator to give information about its token sale.
- The newspaper Estado said that the exchange needs to say how much money was raised and who bought them.
- Mercado Bitcoin says it followed all of Brazil’s rules.
The biggest cryptocurrency exchange in Latin America, Mercado Bitcoin has been told by Brazil’s securities regulator to give information about the digital tokens it has given out.
The newspaper Estado reported on Tuesday that Mercado Bitcoin which is the biggest cryptocurrency exchange in the region in terms of volume, needs to give information to Brazil’s Securities and Exchange Commission (CVM) about the fixed-income tokens it has sold over the past two years.
The report also said that the exchange needs to say how much money was raised with the tokens and who bought them.
The report from Estado didn’t say what the tokens were called, but it did say that they were issued on a blockchain and were supposedly backed by real-world assets. It also said that “consortium, energy, writs of payments, and receivables” were “low risk and high yield” areas.
In an email to Decrypt, Mercado Bitcoin said that its sales of tokens followed all of Brazil’s rules.
It also said that it works “actively” with the CVM and Brazil’s central bank to “help make rules for the sector.”
“We do not make public offerings of securities outside the scope of the authorizations we hold as an authorised crowdfunding platform and investment manager,” the statement said.
After the cryptocurrency market sold off, 2TM Group, which owns Mercado Bitcoin, cut jobs.
This month, 15% of 2TM’s staff was laid off, just two months after the company announced another round of layoffs.
2TM has also criticised Brazilian regulators for not having clear rules about cryptocurrencies. In a statement released this month, the company said that the situation in Brazil was “unfair” and that “the legal framework for crypto-activities had not been approved.”
Brazil’s Bitcoin market is booming. It was the first country in the area to start a Bitcoin ETF, and it now has the most crypto exchange-traded funds of any country in the region. And a report from the country’s tax agency this month showed that Brazil had more than one million registered crypto users for the first time in July.
