Ripio Expects Growing Adoption of Crypto Among Latin American Businesses

Latin American cryptocurrency exchange Ripio is reportedly making payment and tokenization products for businesses a bigger part of its offerings.

The company is doing so even as its retail trading business is benefiting from the crypto rally, Bloomberg reported Friday (May 24).

Already, Ripio is seeing crypto being used to help Brazilian importers pay Chinese suppliers, Argentine companies hedge against inflation, and remittance transactions move from the United States to Mexico, according to the report.

These uses have helped the company grow its customer base to more than 10 million users and expand its operations to eight countries in the Americas and Europe, including the U.S., the report said. Ripio also has more than 1,000 business clients.

While retail trading will probably account for most of the company’s revenue this year, Ripio aims to decrease its dependence on that business and add more products for businesses, Ripio CEO Sebastian Serrano told Bloomberg.

Serrano added that he believes businesses could account for 80% of Ripio’s revenue by the end of the decade, per the report.

“Maybe the rate of adoption will be slower, but companies are always looking for ways to improve costs and time, and this technology is superior” to traditional payments methods, Serrano said in the report.

In another development in the crypto space, Bakkt said in January that it expanded its crypto trading capabilities to Brazil, Guatemala, Spain, Hong Kong and Singapore.

In Brazil, Guatemala and Spain, Bakkt is working with stock trading platform Hapi. Together, the two companies offer active crypto trading capabilities in those countries as well as two countries in which these capabilities were already live: Argentina and Mexico.

The report also comes at a time when the Securities and Exchange Commission’s approval of spot bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs) earlier this year has brought in new investors, reignited excitement around cryptocurrency, and reversed the collapse in prices that was seen during the “crypto winter” of 2022.

This has fueled a surge in spot buying and spot bitcoin ETF purchasing.

In addition, venture capital investment in cryptocurrency companies is increasing after nearly two years of cooling.