Binance and Mastercard Team to Tap Into Brazilian Crypto Market

Mastercard has teamed with Binance to tap into the crypto company’s popularity in Brazil.

The companies announced Monday (Jan. 30) they had launched a prepaid card in the South American country, one of Binance’s ten largest global markets.

“The Binance card is part of the company’s ongoing efforts to broaden the connection between traditional and crypto finance,” the announcement said. “The product is in beta and will be widely available in the coming weeks.”

According to the announcement, the card will let Binance users in Brazil with a valid national ID shop and pay bills with cryptocurrencies at more than 90 million Mastercard merchants.

The launch follows last year’s debut of a similar card in Argentina, Binance’s first payments card in Latin America.

“Payments is one of the first and most obvious use cases for crypto, yet adoption has a lot of room to grow,” said Walter Pimenta, executive vice president, products and innovation, Mastercard Latin America and the Caribbean. “By using the Binance Card, merchants continue to receive fiat and the users pay in the cryptocurrency they choose.”

Last year also saw Binance team with embedded payments finance Inswitch to offer Binance Pay to all merchants in Latin America.

“The partnership between Binance Pay and Inswitch will provide millions of LatAm merchants with intriguing options in crypto space, allowing them to increase revenue by accepting crypto, and enable all companies with a new way to service payments,” the companies said in September.

The new features allow merchants to receive payments in more than 50 cryptocurrencies with “lightning-fast” payments while also supporting new products or business models.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote last week about the heightened scrutiny on the cryptocurrency industry following the collapse of FTX, and the role Binance has played.

The company publicly admitted that management of its customer funds “has not always been perfect,” as a Reuters report revealed that Binance had served for years as one of the top thoroughfares for crypto exchange Bitzlato, recently cited by federal authorities.

The U.S. Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network (FinCEN) stated in its “Imposition of Special Measure Prohibiting the Transmittal of Funds Involving Bitzlato” order that Binance was among Bitzlato’s top three counterparties by the amount of digital assets received between May 2018 and September 2022.