Creator of Mercado Livre’s “cryptocurrency” started programming at the age of 10

Creator of Mercado Livre’s “cryptocurrency” started programming at the age of 10

Sebastián Serrano founded the Ripio cryptocurrency platform in 2013, but his passion for the technology started early.

At age 7, the boy, born in the countryside of Patagonia, Argentina, read a magazine about the transformative potential of computing, begged his parents for a computer and, when he finally got one, started to program in a self-taught way.

“It was a Commodore 64, very old, it was about 10 years old. I could learn to program and make video games, so I started to learn,” he says.

Serrano grew up surrounded by books and magazines, but he saw technology as a path that would lead him to the founding of one of the largest cryptocurrency companies in Latin America.

With more than 2 million customers and 400 employees, Ripio is the company that made it possible to create Mercado Livre’s own cryptocurrency, which will be granted to buyers as cashback (money back) on purchases.

Today, Ripio’s main market is still Argentina, where investors have the habit of investing in international financial products to protect against the devaluation of the peso.

“Argentina has needs that still make crypto very necessary, but Brazil is almost our biggest market. We have almost a hundred people on the country team,” she says.

Coin Market

The project with Mercado Livre began to be developed last year. Called Mercado Coin, the crypto asset is now available as a way to reward consumers who buy from the company’s e-commerce.

“There are some factors that make a cryptocurrency work or not. It needs to generate value for people, be useful or allow something new. In the case of Mercado Coin, he will develop the company’s loyalty program”, says Serrano.

In 2020, a year marked by the Covid-19 pandemic and a cycle of bitcoin appreciation that would only end at the end of 2021, Ripio was named by the World Economic Forum as one of the technological pioneers of the year, due to its trading technology. of cryptocurrencies.

To gain scale in the Brazilian market, between the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021, Ripio bought the company BitcoinTrade; today, it has more than 600 thousand customers in the country.

Capitalized after receiving an investment of US$ 50 million, the company now has Chile and Peru in its sights.

The information is from the newspaper. The State of São Paulo.

Source: CNN Brasil