Stablecoin giant Tether has completed a $20 million investment in Mercado Bitcoin, one of Latin America’s largest digital asset exchanges and a key regional partner of Ripple. The funding, announced on July 7, 2026, aims to accelerate the Brazilian platform’s expansion into tokenization, digital payments, and credit markets across Brazil and beyond.
Mercado Bitcoin began as an exchange in 2013 and has since evolved into a fully regulated on-chain financial services platform serving 4.5 million users. It holds over ten licenses across Brazil and Europe—including a Payment Institution license from the Central Bank of Brazil—and operates broker-dealer, securitization, and asset management businesses. The company has already issued more than 2 billion reais in tokenized assets.
A critical aspect of the deal is Mercado Bitcoin’s existing collaboration with Ripple. The two firms previously deployed Ripple Payments for cross-border treasury operations between Brazil and Portugal. Ripple has also supported Mercado Bitcoin’s initiative to bring over $200 million in permissioned real-world assets onto the XRP Ledger (XRPL). With Tether now joining as a strategic investor, the fresh capital is expected to deepen the platform’s tokenization infrastructure and stablecoin-powered payment rails, potentially driving further adoption of XRPL-based assets.
Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino emphasized that the investment aligns with the company’s strategy of backing licensed, practical infrastructure in high-growth markets. He noted that Mercado Bitcoin’s depth of licensing and tokenization capabilities is “unmatched in Latin America.” The move follows similar Tether distributions, including an $8 million round for Abu Dhabi tokenization firm KAIO and an undisclosed investment in cross-border payments app LemFi. Tether reported $1.04 billion in net profit for Q1 2026 and excess reserves of $8.23 billion, while its USDT liquidity stands at roughly $185 billion.
