Ripple and Mercado Bitcoin Partner to Transform Crypto-Enabled Cross-Border Payments in Brazil

Ripple’s enhanced end-to-end payments solution is now available in first Latin America market

SÃO PAULO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ripple, the leading provider of digital asset infrastructure, today announced the launch of Ripple Payments in Brazil. Mercado Bitcoin, Latin America's largest cryptocurrency exchange, will be the first customer in Brazil to utilize Ripple’s managed end-to-end payments solution, which enables businesses to easily leverage blockchain for faster, cheaper, more efficient cross-border payments in a secure manner. Customers can move funds across the globe 24/7, 365, and settle payments in a matter of minutes - reducing time and friction to make moving value dramatically more efficient.

This news builds upon last year's debut of new functionality that enables Ripple to manage payments end-to-end on behalf of its customers. Mercado Bitcoin will use the solution to improve its internal treasury operations between Brazil and Portugal, with plans to support international payments for its corporate and retail customers in the future. One of the differentiators is the use of a non-resident account, allowing users to pay directly in Reais, providing an improved customer experience.

Brazil’s leadership in the cryptocurrency market, progressive approach to policy and growing institutional and developer adoption made it a natural next market to launch Ripple Payments, for the benefit of businesses in Brazil. Ripple opened its local office in Brazil in 2019, and launched its first crypto-enabled payments solution in the market with Travelex Bank in 2022.

Ripple Payments offers a suite of benefits for Brazilian businesses:

• Trust and security: 10+ years of experience in building solutions for financial institutions and adhering to strict regulatory, compliance and security standards.
• Streamlined onboarding: Businesses can quickly integrate and utilize Ripple Payments with minimal friction, accelerating their time-to-market and enabling rapid access to global financial networks.
• One integration, global access: Through a single integration with Ripple as the sole counterparty, businesses gain seamless access to over 80+ payout markets worldwide, simplifying cross-border transactions and expanding their global reach.
• 24/7 liquidity: Businesses can access on-demand liquidity across multiple currencies at any time, ensuring efficient and timely transactions regardless of the destination or time zone.

"Ripple Payments offers unique capabilities that are important to crypto businesses enabling them to streamline operations, optimize liquidity, and ultimately improve margins through real-time payment settlement,” said Silvio Pegado, Managing Director of LATAM at Ripple. “We’re thrilled to partner with Mercado Bitcoin, a market leader in crypto with more than a decade of experience bringing tokenized services to Brazil.”

"The idea is to provide a simplified transfer through the expertise of Ripple, our international partner specializing in cross-border payments," says Jordan Abud, Head of Banking at MB. " At the same time, this partnership enables Mercado Bitcoin to take another step towards internationalizing its services. The possibility of facilitating this type of operation, offering lower costs and making the platform even more complete shows our commitment to customers, while expanding the portfolio of products we offer today.”

With its simple, secure, compliant digital asset infrastructure, Ripple is well positioned to provide the core services that financial institutions need to tokenize, store, exchange and move digital assets. Ripple Payments has near-global coverage with 80+ payout markets, which represent more than 90% coverage of the daily FX markets, processing more than $50B in volume. It has over a decade of experience in the digital asset space and holds 55+ regulatory licenses and registrations in various jurisdictions.

The product is not yet available to customers, and the first operation will be institutional, exclusively from Mercado Bitcoin to Mercado Bitcoin Portugal.

About Ripple

Ripple is the leading provider of digital asset infrastructure for financial institutions—delivering simple, compliant, reliable software that unlocks efficiencies, reduces friction, and enhances innovation in global finance. Ripple’s solutions leverage the XRP Ledger and its native digital asset, XRP, which was purpose-built to enable fast, low-cost, highly scalable transactions across developer and financial use cases. With a proven track record working with regulators and policymakers around the world, Ripple’s payments, custody and stablecoin solutions are pioneering the digital asset economy—building credibility and trust in enterprise blockchain. Together with customers, partners and the developer community, we are transforming the way the world creates, stores, manages and moves value.

About Mercado Bitcoin

With 4 million customers in 11 years of operation, Mercado Bitcoin is the leading digital asset investment platform in Latin America and a benchmark in blockchain and the tokenized economy, operating with the highest standards of transparency and financial integrity. It is Brazil's first crypto unicorn and has been audited since 2018, and since 2022 by EY - one of the world's largest auditing firms.