Brazil’s Biggest Brokerage Goes Big on Bitcoin

Grupo XP, Brazil’s largest independent brokerage and owner of XP Investimentos SA, is launching an exchange in the upcoming months that will facilitate Bitcoin and Ethereum trading. According to Bloomberg, the new crypto exchange dubbed XDEX will have around 40 employees.

With a mission to “to help Brazilians invest better, offering the ideal solutions for each investor”, Grupo XP currently has 500,000 active customers and over 120 billion in the country’s currency reals (~$30 billion) under custody. Grupo XP is reportedly planning to control 1 trillion reals (~$245 billion) by 2020 through its custodial services and is also planning to launch a bank in the near future.

Grupo XP currently offers access to equities, fixed-income products, investment funds, real estate funds, futures, and other financial products.

While this news of the crypto exchange is very exciting, Guilherme Benchimol, the President of XP Investimentos SA, has expressed sentiments indicating otherwise.

Benchimol recently said,

“I must confess, this is a theme I’d rather didn’t exist, but it does. We felt obligated to start advancing in this market.”

Benchimol also mentioned that 3 million Brazilians “have exposure” to Bitcoin, while around approximately 600,000 invest in stocks.

The recent news about XDEX followed a release from Brazilian regulators that featured a set of rules that will allow funds to invest in cryptoassets, with certain limitations. Previously, Ilan Goldfajn, Brazil’s central bank chief, described cryptocurrencies as a Ponzi scheme and a bubble.

Futhermore, The Administrative Council for Economic Defense began investigating Banco Santander Brazil, Banco de Brazil, among others for potentially working together to shut down the accounts of cryptoasset trading platforms.

As Grupo XP is clearly making a big push into the cryptoasset exchange space with XDEX, we will see how this venture takes shape over the next few months.