Description
Bitso is a cryptocurrency exchange based in Mexico founded in 2014. Its CEO is Daniel Vogel, CTO is Ben Peters and CDO is Pablo Gonzalez.
History
Founded in 2014, Bitso was Mexico's first Bitcoin exchange. Bitso offers a remittance service for Mexican pesos through a Ripple gateway, allowing international flows of pesos, US dollars, and Bitcoin. At the time, the exchange supported 50% 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, 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 7,300 USD. After the acquisition, Unisend's CEO Jose Rodriguez took on the role of vice president for payments. 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 unbanked 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.
In 2019, the exchange had 750,000 users in Mexico. In October, Ripple invested in the company, 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.
In 2020, the company announced that it had surpassed one million customers, of which 92% were Mexicans, after its trade volume surged more than 300% over a period of eight months.
