Binance launches its Mastercard in Brazil

Binance, the most popular crypto-exchange, has officially launched its Mastercard crypto card in Brazil. The trading platform had announced earlier this year its expansion plan to increase the countries where its debit card can be used.

Binance and the launch of its Mastercard crypto card in Brazil

The largest crypto-exchange by trading volume, Binance, announced that it has officially launched its Mastercard crypto card in Brazil. 

#Binance Card is available in Brazil 🇧🇷https://t.co/qMY6afSryl pic.twitter.com/qYFPelHdSn

— CZ 🔶 Binance (@cz_binance) February 15, 2023

As of now, Brazilians can use their new Binance debit card to spend from their crypto accounts. Indeed, the Mastercard will proceed to convert cryptocurrencies into euros in real time, at the time of the transaction. 

Brazil thus joins a list of countries where the Binance Mastercard can be used. So far, the list of countries does not include America and England, and only supports conversion to euros.

Not only that, Binance’s crypto card in Brazil will allow payments using as many as 13 crypto assets, including Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum (ETH) and Binance USD (BUSD).

For each crypto transaction, there will be a fee to pay of 0.9%, while the Mastercard card also offers cashback service of up to 8% and will allow withdrawals from Mastercard ATMs without fees. 

Binance and Mastercard’s card partnership in Brazil

Last month, Binance and Mastercard entered into a partnership specifically for payments in Brazil that included the creation of the prepaid (or debit) card with which to make crypto payments.

The choice of Brazil was not made at random. According to reports, through studies and market analysis, Binance has highlighted the importance of the South American federal state.

And indeed, Binance is investing in new services for local users, and contributing to the development of the blockchain and crypto ecosystem in the country.

Not only that, recent studies have confirmed that in 2022, about 49% of consumers in Brazil said they had made a transaction with cryptocurrency in the past 12 months. This is a high percentage, well above the global average which is 41%.

BNB’s price recovery in the past 24 hours

In the last 24 hours, Binance Coin (BNB) has made a price recovery with +10%, bringing it back to $323 at the time of writing.

And indeed, since Monday 13/2, the cryptocurrency had begun to see its price drop quickly and sharply. Probably the cause was the association between BUSD and BNB that would “mislead” investors.

Basically, the issuing company Paxos is behind Binance USD (BUSD), which uses the Binance brand only because it has been granted the right to use it for that purpose, whereas the crypto-exchange itself is behind BNB.

The only relationship between BUSD and BNB lies in the fact that in order to execute stablecoin transactions on the Binance Smart Chain (or BSC), fees must be paid in BNB. 

Lo and behold, earlier this week Paxos decided to discontinue its business relationship with Binance precisely because it is having problems with the SEC, to the point where it also has to discontinue the minting of new BUSD tokens. 

Presumably, this factor was seen by investors as a problem with Binance’s BNB crypto, so much so that within a few hours BNB dropped from $315 to $289, to as low as $284.

This dump was then recovered as of yesterday, when BNB rose from $294 to the current $323.