“We intend to have an office in Brazil, in São Paulo. We already have several employees in Latin America and it would be a good idea to do business directly with the people here, because they understand more about the mentality and culture of the country,” says Irina Valentovich, CCO at CoinsPaid. “In a month or two we intend to set up a place here to represent our product.”
Valentovich was in the country lat week attending the Brazilian iGaming Summit (BiS). CoinsPaid points out that there was a 128% growth in transactions and a 268% growth in volumes in the use of cryptocurrencies to pay for online gambling in the first quarter of 2022 compared to the same period last year.
Today, CoinsPaid is the world's largest company in cryptocurrency solutions for online betting payments. In Latin America, it recognizes that the iGaming sector has grown a lot mainly in the wake of sports betting sites.
However, the executive clarifies that the company's interest and operations in the region go beyond the so-called gambling sector. “We don't just work with gambling, we are in Latin America migrating a lot to e-commerce, developing solutions for payment with cryptocurrencies.”
A survey conducted by CoinsPaid showed that in Brazil 63.1% of people could pay in cryptocurrencies for at least some of their physical retail purchases. Of these, 36.3% said they would use digital currencies in any physical store. The study, which surveyed 1,506 people in March in Argentina, Brazil and Colombia, also revealed that the acceptance rate for at least some purchases was 65.4% for Colombians and 65% for Argentines.
The data contrasts with 36.9% of Brazilians who answered that they would never use cryptocurrencies in a physical store and 30.4% who stated that they would not use this type of asset in online stores either.
However, Valentovich admits that there are several challenges for cryptocurrency payments to take off, at least outside of decentralized finance and digital asset environments. “The biggest one is the volatility of cryptocurrencies,” she says.
Brazil specifically, for her, has become an even more challenging market on this front thanks to the wide adoption of PIX, which for now is used more as a transfer method, but which in the future may also disrupt payment methods. “PIX is a very specific local method, which makes the adoption of cryptocurrencies as a payment in Brazil even more challenging, but it is only a local method, it does not serve to make an international remittance,” argues Valentovich.
Another point cited as an obstacle is that as interest in cryptocurrencies grows in the world there would be “many countries wanting to regulate this market, and some of them in a very restrictive way,” she says.
One of these, according to her, would be Estonia, the platform's country of origin. “Comparing 2019 and 2022, the regulation in Estonia became much stricter, so many companies returned their licenses because it is difficult to operate with so many requirements on the regulatory side,” she laments, noting that the country was once a hub of the sector. Regarding the cryptocurrency regulation bill that is currently being processed in the Brazilian Congress, the executive sees that the market itself wants to be regulated and does not see such a restrictive movement for now.
Aside from the cryptocurrency payment platform, CoinsPaid has digital wallet options for companies and individuals, as well as a SaaS (software as a service) line of business and its own token, the CPD. The company founded in 2014 records more than 12 billion euros in processed cryptocurrencies and 21 million transactions carried out since then.
One of the company's planned launches in Brazil is the integration of PIX with the B2C digital wallet, projected to take place in the fourth quarter of this year. “The application is ready, we are just preparing the integration for the locations in Brazil,” she comments.
Source: Valor
