Tech Roundup: Are Brazilians willing to use crypto for payments?

Welcome to our Tech Roundup, where we bring you the biggest stories in technology and innovation in Brazil and Latin America. This week: Crypto players are launching new products and partnerships aiming at making investors use digital assets as payments.

Brazilians increasingly willing to use crypto for payments

There are no official statistics on how much Brazilians are using cryptocurrencies and stablecoins in their day-to-day lives, but data from global players and some of the latest moves of local fintech companies indicate that this behavior is getting increasingly common. 

State of play. Global companies such as Binance have seen the number of payment transactions with crypto skyrocket in Latin America. At the same time, large national players, such as Foxbit and Mercado Bitcoin (MB), are entering into partnerships and seeking new licenses to launch new products, respectively, betting that more Brazilians will start using their crypto assets for payments.

By the numbers. The latest Global Payments Report by Worldpay from FIS shows that cryptocurrencies are still in their infancy for person-to-business (P2B) payments, despite consumers’ growing awareness of these assets as investments or stores of value. They represented only 0.19 percent of global e-commerce transaction value (or USD 11.6 billion) in 2022.

• Still, the second-largest segment among the 100 crypto firms with operational headquarters in Latin America in 2022 was payments (27.41 percent), according to a report from Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance and the...