In an announcement to Reuters News on November 4, Brazilian crypto exchange Mercado Bitcoin stated that it has signed an agreement with Comerc. Comerc is one of the main retail energy providers in Brazil. The two firms have partnered to develop renewable energy tokens.
Comerc and Mercado Bitcoin aim to implement two separate types of tokens that will incentivize renewable energy use. The first is scheduled to launch in 2022 and it will be tied to a cashback scheme meant for solar energy generation. Today, Comerc clients get up to 15% to 20% of their electricity bills’ value in various cashbacks in case they decide to switch to solar energy.
The second token will be connected to certificates that document energy consumption from renewable sources. In an official statement to Reuters, Matheus Nogueira, the CEO of Nori, which is a firm that distributes energy to Comerc, said:
“The token can be treated like any other currency, but it has an additional benefit, it is a token that represents a renewable generation.”
In the meantime, one executive linked to the project at Comerc gave this remark about the 3 “Ds” of the firm’s initiative about renewable energy:
“First, decarbonization, encouraging clean energy; the second is decentralization, our plants are based on distributed generation…, and finally, digitalization.”
Mercado Bitcoin alleges to be the biggest crypto exchange in all of Latin America. It has over three million clients. Based on data acquired from CoinGecko, the crypto exchange lists 11 coins and had a significant trading volume of $19.4 million in the last 24 hours.
Earlier in the year, Mercado Bitcoin saw a $200 million investment from Japanese multinational conglomerate Softbank. This exchange has processed the US dollar equivalent of more than $5 billion in cryptocurrency since January 2021.