Mercado Bitcoin has raised $200 million in a Series B funding round from the SoftBank Latin America fund, a press release says, according to parent company 2TM Group.
The company plans to use its funds to boost its scale, add more offerings and invest in infrastructure in order to match the new demand for crypto. It also plans to add more team members to get to 700 total by the end of 2021.
Mercado Bitcoin has done well for itself over the past year, and it now has 2.8 million clients, which is more than 70 percent of the entire individual investors base for Brazil. And between January and May of this year, the company saw more than 700,000 new customers sign up.
According to Gustavo Chamati, Mercado Bitcoin’s cofounder and board member, the new funding would allow the company to “capitalize on the surging interest in cryptocurrencies in both Brazil and Latin America more broadly, resulting in the significant expansion of our market share in the past year and paving the way for continued growth.”
Circle has made the announcement that customers will now be able to use the USD Coin on the TRON blockchain, a company blog says.
That means that the digital currency will now be available on one of Asia’s largest digital asset systems.
TRON USDC’s launch now means that companies will have more access to the Circle Account and the Circle APIs for transaction and treasury services.
Developers will now have more access to on- and off-ramps using fiat currency within the financial system, making use of wire, ACH and card-based payments.
Circle wrote that TRON was now part of the Multichain Partner Program, which works on allowing more interoperability and liquidity for blockchains to boost economic prosperity.
Now ecosystem partners will have the option to have a swap facility and access better customer flows across both crypto and traditional finances.
Because of prolific scams, South Africa will be regulating crypto more, a press release says.
“We are trying to put in place the regulatory framework quickly,” said Kuben Naidoo, chief executive officer of South Africa’s banking regulator known as the Prudential Authority, the release says. “Our view is that crypto is a financial product and should be regulated as a financial product.”
This could result in more rules for crypto even by the end of this year.
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