Mercado Mercado Libre (MELI), Latin America’s largest e-commerce company by market capitalization, is expected to generate. According to the company, on August 18 it launched its own cryptocurrency in Brazil, in addition to offering its own services.
With Mercado coin, the company said, it will be possible to make purchases on Mercado Libre with the currency and receive it as cash back on purchases later on. There will be an initial price of 10 cents for Mercado Coin, which will be tradable on the company’s digital wallet, Mercado Pago. The price will be subject to market conditions based on the performance of the Mercado Coin, the company said.
The cashback will be used primarily for payments on MercadoLibre’s platform and for purchasing items within the platform in general. There was also a hint from the developers that the token would eventually see its way onto the secondary market at some point, although they did not go into any detail on this. “MercadoLibre’s cryptocurrency will be initially valued at $0.10 apiece before being open to market fluctuation.”
As of the end of August, Mercado Libre has committed to making the cryptocurrency available to its 80 million Brazilian users, and it says it plans to make it available in other countries soon, without providing any further details.
There will be a partnership between Mercado Libre and Ripio, a crypto company, with the objective of operating its cryptocurrency on the Mercado Pago platform, while providing custody and trading services on the Ripio platform.
According to the company, the cryptocurrency was created using the ERC-20 token standard on the Ethereum blockchain, which is based on the ERC-20 token standard. Transferring to external wallets is not permitted during the first stage.
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.
Guilherme Cohn, Senior manager of corporate development – Mercado Libre
One year ago this December, Mercado Libre launched a cryptocurrency trading feature in Brazil which was soon embraced by one million users. A Latin American version of the same product is planned to be launched by the company in the near future. Apart from MercadoCoin and the crypto wallet, Mercadolibre is also an investor in Bitcoin as a company, is a strategic shareholder in Paxos and one of the largest cryptocurrency exchanges in Brazil, and is one of the original members of MercadoPago, the fintech branch of the now defunct Libra Association.
