Brazil’s largest crypto exchange, Mercado Bitcoin (MB), is pivoting from pure trading toward becoming a full-fledged financial super app — one that blends blockchain infrastructure with mainstream financial services like digital fixed income, payments, and remittances, all without using crypto-native terminology.
In an interview at the DAC Conference 2025, Daniel Cunha, Head of Corporate Development at Mercado Bitcoin, said the firm aims to build “the app where Brazilians manage their financial lives.” Rather than emphasizing trading charts and token markets, the company now focuses on “invisible blockchain”, technology that powers financial products in the background, without users needing to interact with tokens or technical jargon.
“The revolution happens when the protocol disappears,” said Cunha. “Customers don’t want to hear about blockchains and tokens. They want to know the rate, the risk, and the maturity date.”
Mercado Bitcoin has even scrubbed “tokenization” from its vocabulary, rebranding it as “digital fixed income”, a linguistic shift that, according to Cunha, sent adoption soaring. The firm expects to surpass $560 million in tokenized credit by year-end, with RWAs already making up about 20% of its assets under custody.
Mercado Bitcoin’s trading arm, once 95% of its revenue, now makes up around 60% as it pivots toward custody, tokenized investments, and payments. By 2025, it expects trading to drop below 30% while expanding operations to Portugal and the U.S. to link global capital with Brazil’s tokenized credit market.
This “invisible blockchain” approach mirrors a broader fintech shift — embedding blockchain infrastructure without jargon, much like Coinbase and Revolut’s push to merge traditional finance with on-chain systems.
This evolution comes on the heels of Mercado Bitcoin’s partnership with Ripple, where the firm announced plans to move over $200 million in tokenized financial products — including fixed- and equity-income instruments, onto the XRP Ledger (XRPL). The collaboration, one of the largest RWA initiatives in Latin America, positions XRPL as the foundation for issuing and managing regulated financial assets.
According to Silvio Pegado, Ripple’s Head of Latin America, the integration “shows how public blockchain infrastructure is now trusted by institutions and ready to deliver cost-efficient, compliant financial products.” MB is building a model where users interact with familiar financial products, while blockchain quietly handles trust, speed, and transparency underneath.
