The largest independent brokerage company in Brazil, Grupo XP, owner of XP Investimentos SA, will begin trades supporting bitcoin and ethereum in the coming months.
As Chief Executive Officer Guilherme Benchimol said at the event in Sao Paulo, about 3 million Brazilians are ready to invest in bitcoin, while only 600,000 are investing in stocks. He told reporters: “We felt obliged to start moving forward in this market.”
Trade will be carried out separately from other brokerage companies XP and will be called XDEX and have about 40 employees.
This week, Brazilian regulators issued a series of rules that allow funds to invest in cryptocurrency assets, but with certain restrictions. Earlier, the head of the central bank of Brazil, Ilan Goldfine, compared the cryptocurrency with the Ponzi scheme and with the bubble.
As a custodian, XP plans to manage funds totaling 1 trillion Brazilian real ($ 245 billion) by 2020, which is 4 times more than expected this year. In the coming months, the company will also launch its own bank.
Over the past few years, the company has developed rapidly, offering online platforms for investment to the growing middle class of Brazil. Bank giant Itau Unibanco Holding SA agreed to buy a minority stake in the company last year, whose value was estimated at about 12 billion reais ($ 2.9 billion).
