Could Ripple become bullish with Bitso?

Bitso, a major Mexican exchange, has received funding from Ripple, in addition to Jump Capital and Coinbase.

With this new funding round completed, Bitso expects to tackle other markets like Argentina and Brazil.

As recently reported by Coin Rivet, South American markets have been growing over the past few years, as local currencies devalue versus the US dollar.

Hopefully, with additional exchanges offering quality services adoption will increase.

In Mexico, Bitso acquired a stunning 750,000 customers in a very short period.

Will the trend continue? What will be the long-term impact of Bitso in Latin America?

Bitso concludes additional funding round

The new round of financing comes at an important moment in Bitso’s history.

Recently, the company became Latin America’s first licensed DLT (Digital Ledger Technology) brokerage firm and moved its operations to Gibraltar in search of a regulatory framework offering greater protection and safety for customers.

Ripple believes the company plays an important role within its ecosystem. For instance, Bitso is a key player in RippleNet’s US-Mexico channel by providing liquidity for payments.

In early 2019, Ripple launched ‘Liquidity on Demand’ – a service targeting stable currency liquidity – with MoneyGram in Mexico. Bitso was a major exchange partner.

The companies investing in Bitso, including Ripple, are backed by Digital Group and Pantera Capital, most likely two of the most heavily invested private funds.

These investment-focused organisations have bet on assets such as Bitcoin, Ethereum classic, Civic, Decentraland, Filecoin and in companies like Bakkt, Abra, Blockfolio and Chain Analysis.

Is Bitso looking to expand?

According to sources like Decrypt or The Block, Ripple executives underline the importance of acquiring markets like Argentina and Brazil.

Ripple’s SVP of product, Asheesh Birla, said during an interview that the investment and partnership between Ripple and Bitso would be instrumental in strengthening and expanding ODL in Latin America (LATAM).

The C-level executive added Ripple had always been committed to growing a strong, healthy XRP ecosystem to enable faster, cheaper global payments. Birla noted that the partnership could help further the growth of the ecosystem by offering greater liquidity for payments, when referring to Mexico.

If the same logic is applied throughout other LATAM countries, one can imagine the real impact this partnership could have.

Although the British Pound, the EURO and the US dollar have been quite stable during the recent past, the same cannot be said of the many local LATAM currencies.

For instance, Venezuela and Argentina are currently suffering from currency devalue, and the Brazilian Real has been losing purchasing power versus the USD over the past few years.

I argue the trend will most likely continue as long as the US dollar is the global reserve of value.

Bringing Bitcoin and cryptocurrency to the masses!

And it’s not only Bitso. Other projects and platforms have been helping with cryptocurrency adoption within regions where Bitcoin’s reach is less noticeable.

For example, digital advertising – a key service for increased adoption – is also showing strong signs of development.

The Brave browser – developed by the Basic Attention Token (BAT) team – has already acquired millions of downloads and users (like myself). The idea is that content creators can directly be rewarded by users, without any intermediaries.

The concept behind Brave has been getting traction, as more and more people join the space and learn about alternative rewards systems.

AdEx is a blockchain start-up that aims to revolutionise the space. The idea behind AdEx is to connect advertisers, publishers, and daily web users with a view to creating a transparent, open-source, and tamper-proof display advertising ecosystem.

AdEx has created a decentralised advertising hub that is backed by the peer-to-peer benefits of blockchain technology. As the platform was built on top of the Ethereum protocol, every time a website impression is executed via AdEx, it subsequently creates a new transparent and auditable transaction.

The AdEx platform is already proving to be popular with users, racking up over 9 million impressions since inception.