The purchase makes the eCommerce platform the 36th publicly traded company to add Bitcoin to its balance sheet.
Mercado Libre, the largest e-commerce platform in Latin America, has announced to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) that it acquired $7.8 million in Bitcoin in the first quarter of 2021. It stated in the report:
“As part of our treasury strategy this quarter we purchased $7.8 million in Bitcoin, a digital asset that we are disclosing within our indefinite-lived intangible assets”.
The purchase makes the Argentinean company the first large Latin American company to acquire Bitcoin for its treasury and sees it join an exclusive club of companies such as MicroStrategy and Tesla, which have previously announced to the authorities the holding of BTC within their assets.
Just last week major Japanese game developer Nexon announced it had purchased 1,717 BTC for it's balance sheet at a cost of roughly $100 million. Mercado Libre's announcement makes it the 36th publicly listed company to hold Bitcoin according to Bitcoin Treasuries. Mercado Libre trades on Nasdaq as MELI.
Mercado Libre's bet on Bitcoin
Beyond the formal announcement, the relationship of the popular eCommerce portal with Bitcoin is not new. As previously reported by Cointelegraph en Español, at the end of April it enabled the use of Bitcoin for their real estate verticals in the Argentine market.
In addition, Marcos Galperín, founder and former CEO of Mercado Libre, has already announced publicly on several occasions that he has owned Bitcoin in his personal portfolio since 2013, and has also expressed a variety of bullish opinions regarding the cryptocurrency ecosystem in Latin America, even stating that he saw Bitcoin as a better store of value than gold.
