Brazil’s Largest Digital Bank Nubank Reaches 1M Crypto Users After Just a Month

This article is adapted from CoinDesk Brasil, a partnership between CoinDesk and InfoMoney, one of Brazil's leading financial news publications. Follow CoinDesk Brasil on Twitter.

Nubank, the largest Brazilian digital bank by market value, reached 1 million users on its crypto trading platform just one month after launching in June, the company said on Tuesday.

The company had hoped to reach the milestone within a year, after launching Nucripto in May and making it available to its 46.5 million users in June.

The platform allows users to buy and sell bitcoin (BTC) and ether (ETH) through a crypto-trading and custody service provided by Paxos’ blockchain infrastructure.

In May, the company announced it was allocating roughly 1% of the cash on its balance sheet to bitcoin to demonstrate its belief in the cryptocurrency.

Read more: Why Brazil Is the Big Latin American Bet for Global Crypto Exchanges

“Nubank has, in eliminating complexity, a value proposition that permeates all our products. With crypto activities, this becomes even more relevant due to the fact that it is a market with complex systems that make it difficult for people interested in taking their first steps to join,” Thomaz Fortes, leader of Nubank's crypto area, said in a statement.

On Monday, the Mexico-based crypto exchange Bitso also announced it had reached 1 million users in Brazil, a market where it competes with leading local exchange Mercado Bitcoin, which has more than 5 million users in the South American country.

Nubank is also targeting the tokenization market, Nubank CEO David Vélez told Brazilian media outlet NeoFeed on Tuesday, without disclosing further details.

Last week, Itaú Unibanco, Brazil's largest private bank, said that it plans to launch an asset tokenization platform that transforms traditional finance products into tokens.

Read more: Why Brazilians Are Turning to Stablecoins Like Tether

Other major fintech players have also entered the crypto sector recently. In July, the Brazilian fintech PicPay, which has more than 30 million active users, announced it plans to launch a crypto exchange and a Brazilian real-tied stablecoin in 2022.

And in December, Mercado Libre, Latin America’s largest e-commerce company by market value, started allowing users in Brazil to buy, sell and hold cryptocurrencies.

This article was translated by Andrés Engler and edited by CoinDesk. The original Portuguese can be found here.