2023-12-04 14:10:40
© Reuters. REUTERS/Marco Bello
By Paula Arend Laier
SÃO PAULO (Reuters) – The market for buying and selling crypto assets in Brazil will have a strong competitor starting this Monday, when Itaú Unibanco (BVMF:) starts offering to trade ether through the your ion investment platform.
The largest Brazilian bank enters a segment in which there are already ‘players’ such as MB, Binance, Foxbit and Mynt, from BTG Pactual (BVMF:), among others, and bet as a differentiator the fact that digital assets will be held in custody in the same Bank.
“It is the first market solution that uses custody from one of the major banks in the market”, stated the director of Itaú Digital Assets, Guto Antunes, highlighting that the custody of assets was a “super relevant” topic considered by the institution’s team for the launch of services.
The executive added that the bank’s decision to start offering the purchase and sale of cryptocurrencies follows the maturity and evolution of regulation for digital assets.
Itaú’s arrival in this universe occurs at a less turbulent time for cryptocurrencies, with bitcoin having accumulated an appreciation of more than 130% so far in 2023, after a fall of 64% in 2022, a year that was marked by the collapse of the giant FTX.
Despite the strong recovery, bitcoin’s price of $38,400 remains far from the historic high of $69,000, reached during a session in November 2021.
According to Antunes, in the initial stage, customers registered with ion will be able to purchase cryptocurrencies with a minimum value of 10 reais, at zero fees. Price formation will occur through liquidity pools, he said, without elaborating. “We have a structure already adapted to provide this access.”
The idea is also not to stop at the two largest capitalized cryptocurrencies in the world.
“It starts with bitcoin, but our major strategic planning is to extend it to other cryptoassets in the future, in accordance with regulatory developments and also other types of tokens with the evolution of the real asset tokenization market,” said the executive.
In the opposite direction XP Inc (NASDAQ:) and PicPay announced in October to clients that they would no longer offer cryptoactive purchase and sale operations, just over a year after launching their “exchanges” in August 2022. XP (BVMF:) did not explain, but PicPay cited regulatory uncertainty in the sector.
“We know that in the near future there is a very large potential for the tokenization of real assets and that this also comes from this behavior of buying cryptocurrencies”, argued the Itaú Digital Assets executive.
“This is what Itaú strongly believes, in this potential not only in cryptocurrencies, but in all blockchain technology that gives the possibility of having tokens, distribution of tokens.”
Itaú Digital Assets also actively participates in the pilot project to implement Drex, the Brazilian Central Bank’s digital currency.
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