By
Tolu Ajiboye
April 8th, 2024
Lucas Rabechini, XP financial products director, disclosed that the company has projected to reach 200,000 crypto-active users by the end of the year.
The largest brokerage firm in Brazil, XP has officially launched its crypto trading platform called XTAGE. According to reports, the platform was built on the trading technology of the American Stock Exchange NASDAQ. Also, it was integrated with MetaTrader 5. According to XP, users are eligible to trade Bitcoin (BTC) and Ethereum (ETH) for now, and it is expected that eight more digital assets would be added by the end of the year. This initiative is being done in partnership with BitGo which will store XTAGE’s assets. In this case, most of the assets will be held in a cold wallet.
Lucas Rabechini, XP financial products director disclosed that the company has projected to reach 200,000 crypto-active users by the end of the year. This is not far-fetched as the company already has 3.6 million users.
Rebechini further stated that they were resolute in their decision as the bearish market and the collapse of the likes of Celsius and Voyager did not change their long-term focus on crypto.
“You can say ‘the volume has been weak, there will be few orders,’ but we see this market systematically growing over time, and our long-term view is not just focused on price, but also technology,” he said.
Recently, another Brazilian digital bank, Nubank announced the launch of its crypto trading platform. Initially, Nubank exposed customers to BTC and ETH. Interestingly, it took just one month to hit one million users. Mercado Libre, the largest e-commerce company in Latin America has equally surpassed 1 million users on its crypto trading platform.
Rebechini admitted that competition will be very tough as they would be up against competent firms including those “that have done their homework.”
XTAGE CEO Marcos Horie said during the launch that the company’s decision was much influenced by the “tons of requests” received by clients who wanted to invest in crypto within the XP environment. According to Horie, the company observed that its users primarily wanted to work with a platform where they have most of their investments already, and they took advantage of that.
It is important to note that the company announced XTAGE in May. In June, it rolled out employees on the platform to test it.
