In brief
- Binance’s peer-to-peer trading platform added support for five Latin American fiat currencies.
- The company said it has seen a trading volume spike since early March amidst global economic turmoil from COVID-19.
- Binance continues its aggressive expansion to add more fiat currencies to its P2P platform.
Binance, the leading crypto exchange by volume, announced on Tuesday that it now supports five new fiat currencies from Latin America on its peer-to-peer (P2P) trading platform. The fiat currencies added were the Brazilian real (BRL), Argentine peso (ARS), Colombian peso (COP), Mexican peso (MXN), and Peruvian sol (PEN).
Users will now be able use those fiat currencies to buy and sell cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin (BTC), Ethereum’s Ether (ETH), Tether’s USD stablecoin (USDT), and Binance’s coin (BNB), the company confirmed in a blog post.
“Latin America is one of the most active regions for cryptocurrency trading, and peer-to-peer trading is widely used in the Latin American community," said Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao (CZ). “To better serve our users’ large demand for crypto, we are offering an open marketplace with the best P2P trading experience.”
The coronavirus has resulted in chaos in financial markets, but Binance said it “saw a surge of over $140 million in P2P trades” since the beginning of March. “Amidst the current global economic uncertainty, cryptocurrency is still a favorable asset with great potential use despite its price volatility,” CZ said.
The company, which is no longer slated to be based in Malta, had originally launched its P2P platform in China last year, providing Chinese crypto traders with an onramp after the Chinese government cracked down on crypto.
The company has since added the Vietnamese dong (VND) in January and the Nigerian naira (NGN) in early March. It has said it would continue “an aggressive expansion plan” for more fiat currencies in 2020. With the latest additions, there are now 18 different fiat currencies compatible with the P2P trading platform.
Latin America has long been a darling of the crypto community, as political and economic instability has plagued parts of the region for decades. In recent months, Latin American countries like Colombia, Chile, and Argentina have seen spikes in Bitcoin trading volume on the Local Bitcoins exchange, according to Coin Dance, a site that tracks metrics.
With Binance’s latest additions, Latin Americans will have a new onramp to the volatile (but perhaps more stable than fiat) world of cryptocurrency.