2TM Raises $20M Series C: Why Tether Just Bet on Brazil's Oldest Crypto Exchange

Gustavo and Mauricio Chamati started Mercado Bitcoin in 2013, back when explaining what a cryptocurrency exchange even was took longer than most sales pitches. It was Brazil's first, built years before regulators had a framework for it, years before "crypto" was a word institutional investors said out loud in board meetings. For a long stretch, the brothers bootstrapped the whole thing, reinvesting every real of profit straight back into the business because nobody else was writing checks for Bitcoin exchanges in São Paulo.

That patience compounded into something unusual in Latin American tech: an early mover that never got leapfrogged. By 2021, Mercado Bitcoin — under holding company 2TM, led by Chairman and CEO Roberto Dagnoni — had become profitable, crossed millions of users, and pulled in a $200 million round from SoftBank's Latin America Fund at a $2.1 billion valuation, making it one of the region's first crypto unicorns. But the harder work was what came next: over a decade of accumulating regulatory licenses most crypto companies never bother pursuing. A Payment Institution license from Brazil's Central Bank. Broker-dealer capability. Asset management authority. More than ten licenses in total, across Brazil and Europe.

That regulatory depth is precisely what brought Tether to the table in July 2026. The world's largest stablecoin issuer — the company behind USDT, the digital asset that moves more dollar-equivalent value daily than almost any instrument on earth — invested $20 million in the first closing of 2TM's Series C. It's not a typical venture bet. Tether doesn't run a conventional portfolio; when it deploys capital, it's usually buying deeper distribution for its own stablecoin. Mercado Bitcoin's twelve years of licensing groundwork gives Tether exactly the kind of regulated on-ramp into Brazil's financial system that's nearly impossible to build quickly, no matter how much capital is behind the attempt.

Today Mercado Bitcoin serves 4.5 million users and has issued more than R$2 billion in tokenized assets — real estate, receivables, and other assets represented on-chain, a business line most exchanges don't even attempt because it requires the exact securities and banking licenses 2TM spent a decade collecting. Tether's capital is earmarked to push further into payments infrastructure, tokenized investment products for retail and institutional investors, lending, and on-chain capital markets.

"The discussion is no longer whether finance will move on-chain," Dagnoni said of the round. "That transition is already underway." For a company that spent its first years just trying to convince Brazilians that Bitcoin was worth a second look, having the issuer of the world's most-used stablecoin show up as a strategic partner isn't just a funding round — it's the clearest signal yet that the regulatory patience Mercado Bitcoin bet on in 2013 was the right call all along.

Deal covered in WarZ LatAm VC Monitor — Weekly 28.