- Mercado coins can be used to buy things on Mercado Libre and get cash back on purchases.
- The initial price will be 10 cents, but it will depend on how the market is doing.
- The company expects that its 80 million users in Brazil will be able to use the cryptocurrency by August.
Mercado Libre (MELI), which has the largest market capitalization of any e-commerce company in Latin America, started using its own cryptocurrency in Brazil on Thursday, the company said.
The company said that the Mercado coin can be used to buy things on Mercado Libre and get cash back on purchases.
Mercado Libre expects that its 80 million users in Brazil will be able to use the cryptocurrency by the end of August.
It also said that it plans to offer it in other countries “soon,” but didn’t give any more details.
Mercado Coin will be able to be traded on Mercado Pago, the company’s digital wallet.
The initial price will be 10 cents, but it will depend on how the market is doing.
In partnership with the cryptocurrency company Ripio, Mercado Libre will run its own cryptocurrency, Mercado Pago. Ripio will provide custody and trading services for Mercado Pago.
The company said that the cryptocurrency was made with the ERC-20 token standard on the Ethereum blockchain. Users won’t be able to move it to other wallets during the first stage.
In a statement, Guilherme Cohn, senior manager of corporate development, said that “The blockchain technology behind Mercado coin allowed us to develop an open and extremely secure solution.” “We continue to follow the evolution of cryptocurrencies and blockchain technology, as we believe in the potential of these tools.”
During the month of December, a new way to trade cryptocurrencies was added to Mercado Libre in Brazil.
After another two months, it had reached one million users. The business’s goal is to sell exactly the same goods across the entirety of Latin America.
