Bitso

This article has multiple issues. Please help improve it or discuss these issues on the talk page. (Learn how and when to remove these messages) Some of this article's listed sources may not be reliable. Please help improve this article by looking for better, more reliable sources. Unreliable citations may be challenged and removed. (July 2021) (Learn how and when to remove this message) This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Bitso" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (November 2020) (Learn how and when to remove this message) You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in Spanish. (November 2020) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the Spanish article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,040 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing Spanish Wikipedia article at [[:es:Bitso]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|es|Bitso}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation. (Learn how and when to remove this message)

Bitso

Company type	Privately held company
Industry	Financial services
Founded	January 23rd, 2014
Founders	Ben Peters, Daniel Vogel and Pablo Gonzalez
Headquarters	Brazil, Gibraltar, and Mexico
Area served	Mexico, Argentina, Brazil, and Colombia
Members	5,000,000 (June 2022)
Website	https://bitso.com

Bitso began as a global cryptocurrency exchange founded in Mexico. It was founded in 2014 by Ben Peters, Pablo Gonzalez and Daniel Vogel. Daniel Vogel is the current chief executive officer. Bitso was the first Latin American company and one of the few cryptocurrency platforms to be regulated by the Gibraltar Financial Services Commission under its Distributed Ledger Technology Framework.^[1]

Founded January 23, 2014, by Ben Peters and Pablo Gonzalez, Bitso was Mexico's first Bitcoin exchange, also operating a Ripple gateway, allowing international flows of pesos, US dollars, and Bitcoin with the objective of facilitating US-to-Mexico remittances. At the time, the exchange supported 50 percent of the trading volume for the Mexican Peso/Bitcoin trading pair, its chief competitor at the time being LocalBitcoins, which handled a similar volume.

In 2015, Daniel Vogel, who would go on to become CEO, joined the team as an equal partner, and Bitso acquired a smaller Mexican cryptocurrency exchange Unisend. Bitso's trading volume at the time was itself still quite small, at 33.4 BTC per day, or around US$7,300. After the acquisition, Unisend's CEO Jose Rodriguez took on the role of vice president for payments.^[2]

In 2016, Bitso began selling bitcoins over-the-counter in Mexican convenience stores, through a partnership with Zmart Group, offering bitcoins in over 29,000 locations. The same year, the company closed a $2.5 million round of investment with various investors including Digital Currency Group, Monex, Variv Capital, Xochi Ventures. At the time, Bitso had 20,000 customers and processed about $2.5m worth of transactions a week. One of its main stated goals was to provide services to un-banked people in Mexico, which represents close to half of the population.

In 2018, the platform was announced as one of Ripple's first “preferred digital asset exchanges”, along with Bittrex and Coins.ph. Thomson Reuters began using Bitso to source its quotes for various cryptocurrencies.^[3]

In 2019, the exchange had 750,000 users in Mexico. In October, Ripple invested in the company,^[4] in a bid to expand its operations in Latin America. Two months earlier, Bitso had become the first Distributed Ledger Technology (DLT) licensed exchange in Latin America.^[4]

In 2020, the company announced that it had surpassed one million customers, of which 92 percent were Mexicans, after its trade volume surged more than 300 percent over a period of eight months. Also, in February that year, Bitso officially launched operations in Argentina.^[5]

In May 2021, the company launched operations in Brazil and shortly afterwards announced a Series C investment round led by Tiger Global and Coatue which raised US$250 million, valuing the company at US$2.2 billion.^[6]

In September 2021, the company started operations in El Salvador.^[7]

• Official website