Major Brazilian broker XP opens crypto trading platform

Major Brazilian broker XP is the latest financial firm in the country to offer its customers the ability to trade crypto, with its platform Xtage launching today. 

XP executives rang the opening bell of the Nasdaq exchange this morning in New York and revealed that the platform is now live for users of its mobile app who want to trade bitcoin and ether. 

XP customers will be able to trade crypto using the same app they already use, Xtage CEO Marcos Horie said during the opening bell event. The company received “tons of requests” from its clients to start investing in crypto within XP’s existing ecosystem, Horie said, noting that they were looking to work with a company where they already had most of their investments.

XP counts more than 3.6 million active clients and first announced its plans to launch Xtage in May. 

Several other high-profile Brazilian banks and fintechs have launched crypto trading features in the past few weeks.

Latin America’s largest investment bank, BTG Pactual, finally launched its long-awaited crypto platform Mynt a few weeks ago, CoinTelegraph Brasil reported on July 26. In a LinkedIn update this evening, BTG Pactual’s Head of Digital Assets Andre Portilho said that BTG fully opened Mynt to the market today after first introducing the platform to a restricted group in May. BTG, which has long supported crypto, first discussed its plans to launch Mynt last September, and had been hoping to have the feature live before the end of 2021.  

Brazilian fintech app PicPay also confirmed on August 10 that its Paxos-powered crypto trading platform was now available. 

Digital banking unicorn Nubank also launched a crypto trading platform called Nucripto at the end of June. By July 26, it had already attracted 1 million customers to the new product. Mercado Libre (known as Mercado Livre in Brazil) also said it reached 1 million users for its own crypto offering earlier this year. 

Editor’s note: This story was updated to include additional context about the launch of BTG Pactual’s crypto platform. 

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