Twelve years after launching as a cryptocurrency exchange, Mercado Bitcoin aims to be something completely different.
The São Paulo-based company is less focused on price charts and trading pairs and is currently talking more about Brazil’s central bank’s PIX payments, digital bonds, and streamlined money transfers.
Daniel Cunha, head of corporate development at Mercado Bitcoin, told CoinDesk in an interview on the sidelines of the exchange’s DAC 2025 conference that the company wants to be the app for Brazilians to manage their financial lives. A kind of “super app” for spending, saving and investing.
However, calling MB a “super app” may not fully capture the essence of the strategy. Its leadership prefers another term: financial hub, which blends traditional finance and blockchain, allowing users to take advantage of both without having to understand either.
“Revolutions happen when protocols die,” Cunha told CoinDesk. “Customers don’t want to hear about blockchain or tokens. They want to know rates, risks and expiry dates,” he said, referring to the exchange’s tokenized fixed income products.
“Invisible Blockchain”
This idea changed how MB is presented to users. The company is now focusing on the features it provides rather than relying on crypto-native vocabularies. One of the big changes, Cunha said, is to completely remove the term “tokenization” from user materials.
“We tried a lot of variations,” Cunha said. “When we stopped saying ‘tokens’ and started saying ‘digital bonds,’ things took off.” The idea is to create a product where the back end is powered by blockchain technology, but the front end is still more recognizable to the masses.
Fundamentally, MB’s bet is that “invisible blockchain” is the next frontier.
“Many people will end up using blockchain without realizing they are using it,” MB said. “That’s when you know the revolution has happened.”
The company’s flagship blockchain-based investment product focuses on tokenized private credit, a segment the company believes is underserved in Brazil and ripe for disruption.
According to Chainaosis’ Global Crypto Adoption Index, Brazil ranks among the top five countries in retail crypto usage. MB is positioning itself as a solution to a common problem in this country through its stablecoin-based money transfer service.
Switching from trading
Despite the new initiatives, MB’s core business, cryptocurrency trading, still accounts for the majority of its revenue. However, that balance is changing.
At its peak, trading accounted for 95% of the company’s revenue. Today, that number is close to 60%, with the rest coming from services such as payments, custody, tokenized investments, and asset management. Cunha said he expects trading volumes to fall below 30% over time.
As part of that change, the company is also expanding geographically. It currently operates a client-facing business in Portugal and is building an institutional channel in the US with the aim of connecting capital and investment opportunities across markets.
Mercado Bitcoin, whose assets under management consist of a significant portion of small and medium-sized corporate vaults, expects tokenized credit issuance to exceed 3 billion reais ($563 million) by the end of the year. Currently, approximately 20% of assets stored on the platform are tokenized real-world assets (RWA), an increase from virtually zero a few years ago.
This axis sits within a broader effort to build a “financial super app.” Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong said Coinbase aims to be a “super app” powered by cryptocurrencies that provides “a full range of financial services.”
Beyond cryptocurrencies, fintechs like Revolut and Paytm bundle payments, lending, and investments. This playbook is borrowed from WeChat and Alipay, apps that bundle social, financial, and other features.
Read more: Crypto exchange Mercado Bitcoin tokenizes $200 million in real-world assets on XRP ledger
