In brief
- Mercado Libre killed Mercado Coin after a failed four-year experiment.
- The company’s stablecoin is replacing the Mercado Coin loyalty token.
- Nubank’s Nucoin collapse shows industry-wide failure of reward tokens.
Latin America’s e-commerce giant quietly killed its ERC-20 loyalty token four years in—while Nubank’s Nucoin already died the same death.
Mercado Libre is shutting down Mercado Coin. The company—which is bigger than Amazon in Latin America—announced through its Mercado Pago wallet that the token will stop functioning on April 17.
Users holding the coin have three options: Sell it through the app, spend it as purchase credit on the platform, or do nothing and wait for it to be auto-converted to local fiat. Mercado Libre didn’t explain the decision in its customer notice. The company did not respond to Decrypt’s request for comment.
Mercado Coin launched in August 2022 in Brazil as an ERC-20 token on Ethereum, built along with crypto exchange Ripio. The idea was simple: buy selected products on the marketplace, earn tokens, use them on future purchases, or cash out. It never really caught on.
The token expanded to other markets after its Brazilian debut, but it never built a meaningful base. It lived and died as a curiosity—a loyalty points system with extra steps and a dose of volatility.
That last part is likely why Mercado Libre isn’t abandoning crypto altogether—it’s just changing what kind of crypto it bets on.
In August 2024, the company launched MeliDolar (MUSD), a stablecoin pegged to the U.S. dollar. It’s also built with Ripio, and also accessible through Mercado Pago. The key difference is, of course, the price of MeliDolar doesn’t move. It’s backed by U.S. Treasury securities and dollar deposits, and its value sits exactly where users expect it to.
MeliDolar is also the backbone of the company’s Meli Plus loyalty program. Members get it as cashback on purchases. They can spend it back on the platform, sell it in the app with no fees, or just hold it as a dollar hedge—a genuinely useful feature for Brazilian and Mexican consumers watching their local currencies lose ground. This was the logical step after a brief experiment allowing users to experiment with Paxos’ Stablecoin.
Mercado Libre isn’t alone in learning this lesson the hard way. Nubank—Brazil’s largest bank, a fully digital neobank with over 100 million customers in Brazil alone—ran the same experiment at the same time. Nucoin launched in 2023 on Polygon, airdropped to its massive user base as a loyalty and rewards token.
It subsequently collapsed 97% in value. Nubank suspended trading in September 2024, gave holders 90 days to convert their coins to Bitcoin or USDC, and shut the whole thing down by December. Sixteen million users were left holding the bag, sweetened only by a prize campaign the bank ran to take the edge off.
Mercado Libre still holds more than $38 million in Bitcoin on its balance sheet and continues to offer crypto trading and stablecoin transfers through Mercado Pago. The infrastructure is staying—but not the coin nobody was really using anyway.
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