Twelve years after launching as a cryptocurrency exchange, Mercado Bitcoin aims to be something else entirely.
Less focused on price diagrams and trading pairs, the São Paulo-based company is now talking more about Brazil’s central bank’s PIX payments, digital fixed income and streamlined transfers.
Mercado Bitcoin’s head of business development, Daniel Cunha, Coindesk told in an interview on the sidelines of Exchange’s DAC 2025 conference that the company wants to become the app where Brazilians control their financial lives. A kind of “super app” for expenses, savings and investment.
Still, calling MB a “Super App” may not quite catch the essence of the strategy. Its management prefers another expression: an economic hub that mixes heritage financing with blockchain, and lets users use both without having to understand it.
“The revolution happens when the protocol disappears,” Cunha told Coindesk. “The customer will not hear about blockchains and tokens. They will know that the speed, the risk and the maturity date,” he said, referring to the exchange’s tokenized offering on fixed income.
‘Invisible Blockchain’
This thinking has reshaped how MB presents itself to the users. Instead of relying on crypto-native vocabulary, the company now emphasizes functions in its offer. A major change involved scrapping the term “tokenization” in user -facing materials completely, Cunha said.
“We tried lots of variations,” Cunha said. “When we stopped saying ‘token’ and began to say ‘digital fixed income’, things started. ‘The idea is to have a product whose backend is driven by blockchain technology, but frontend remains more recognizable to the masses.
In essence, MB’s efforts are that “invisible blockchain” is the next limit.
“We will see that many people use blockchain without realizing that they are using blockchain,” MB said. “It’s when you know the revolution has happened.”
The company’s flagship blockchain-based investment products focus on tokenized private credit, a segment that it believes is underrated and mature for disturbance in Brazil.
Brazil ranks among the top five countries for retail crypto use, according to Chainalyses’ Global Crypto Adoption Index. MB places itself as a response to a pain point that is common in the country through a stablecoin-based transfer service.
A turn from trade
Despite all the new initiatives, MB’s core business, crypto trade, is still for most of its revenue. But this balance is changing.
At its highest, trading made up 95% of the company’s income. Today, this number is closer to 60%, with the rest coming from payments, custody, tokenized investments and services such as Asset Management. Over time, the company expects trade to fall below 30%, Cunha revealed.
As part of this shift, the company is also geographically expanded. It now has a client -facing operation in Portugal and builds institutional channels in the United States with the aim of connecting capital and investment opportunities across markets.
Mercado Bitcoin, where a significant portion of assets under the administration consists of small and medium -sized companies’ treasuries, expect to surpass $ 3 billion ($ 563 million) in tokenized credit issuing at the end of the year. About 20% of the assets under custody on the platform are now tokenized assets in the real world (RWAs) up from almost zero just a few years ago.
The pivot sits within a wider push to build “Financial Super Apps.” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong has said Coinbase aims to be a crypto -driven “super app” that would provide “all types of financial services.”
In addition to crypto, fintechs are like revolutening and paying bundling of payments, lending and investing. Playbook borrows from WeChat and Alipay, apps that bundle social, financial and other features.
Read more: Crypto Exchange Mercado Bitcoin to tokenize $ 200 million. In assets in the real world of XRP Ledger
