Mercado Libre Invests in Crypto Firms Paxos And 2TM

By Kevin • January 23, 2022 2:41 pm • Comments

Mercado Libre is Latin America’s largest e-commerce company by market cap and has recently invested in two crypto firms that are well-known.

One of the companies is 2TM which is also known as Brazil’s largest crypto exchange and the other company is a blockchain infrastructure company named Paxos.

The investments were part of Mercado Libre’s strategic vision to help contribute to the overall development and use of crypto assets in the local region.

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This is not Mercado Libre’s first partnership with Paxos as the company had previously integrated Paxos’s blockchain infrastructure to create it’s own digital wallet called Mercado Pago.

Coindesk reports:

“As a leading technology company, we are actively evaluating the various innovations and opportunities around this market as it evolves, aiming to be a core participant in this disruption.

Digital assets and blockchain technology represent a unique, global and collective phenomenon that breaks barriers and creates a level, open playing field for all users to achieve economic empowerment, which is very aligned with our mission as a company,” Andre Chaves, senior vice president at Mercado Libre, said in a statement.

In May 2021, the company, which trades on Nasdaq as MELI, disclosed a $7.8 million bitcoin purchase that was part of its treasury strategy. Last month, its Argentine real estate platform launched a special section for the sale and purchase of properties with bitcoin.

The e-commerce giant has had multiple forays into the crypto space as well as it attempts to help expand crypto services to the rest of Latin America.

Last year in 2021, Mercado Libre had also allowed customers purchases various types of real estate such as apartments, houses, townhouses, and land with bitcoin as a possible payment method.

Aligned with the company’s vision to continue spreading e-commerce and financial services, the e-commerce giant sees these investments into the crypto space as a way to improve the customer experience and be able to reach out to potential customers that are typically out of reach and outside the current financial system.

The company invests using its venture capital arm, the Meli fund, to actively continue finding innovative opportunities of which many are related to blockchain and crypto now.

The company Paxos also released its own statement in response to the announcement of the partnership.

Paxos.com shares:

“We are excited to have Mercado Libre joining 2TM and MercadoBitcoin.com as a shareholder.

As a key player in the Latam tech and financial services industries, Mercado Libre can have significant impact in the further development of crypto and blockchain in the region, and we are excited to explore and work closely with the company to this end in the future,” says Daniel Cunha, Executive Vice President of Corporate Development at 2TM Group.

Walter Hessert, Head of Strategy at Paxos, added: “Mercado Libre was the first major platform to bring crypto and stable coin access to its users in Brazil.

This investment is a strong signal of the company’s dedication to leading mainstream adoption of digital assets across Latin America. We are thrilled to have Mercado Libre as a partner and investor.”

The development of a lot of small to medium business in Latin America will be dependent on whether they have easy access to financial services and the crypto has been able to provide an affordable solution to that problem.

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