(Bloomberg) -- The chief executive officer of Latin American crypto exchange Ripio envisions a future where corporations embrace the use of digital currencies alongside a core following of retail investors.

“In the coming years we are going to see companies start to finance themselves with crypto” through security token offerings, Sebastian Serrano said in an interview. “The capital markets of the future will be based on blockchain.”

After suffering the deep bear market of the past two years, crypto currencies are on a tear in 2024 with investors cheering on US approval of Bitcoin ETFs. In Latin America, Brazilian importers are already paying Chinese suppliers with crypto, while some Argentine companies use it to hedge against triple-digit inflation and crypto is taking a share of remittance transactions between the US and Mexico, Serrano said.

That’s helped Buenos Aires-based Ripio grow to more than 10 million users with operations in eight countries in the Americas and Europe including Brazil, the US and Spain. The company’s 1,000 plus business clients include e-commerce giant MercadoLibre Inc., Serrano said.

Retail trading juiced by the crypto rally will probably generate most of Ripio’s revenue this year, up from about 40% in 2023, Serrano said. But Ripio has plans to decrease its dependence on fickle retail-trading revenues with new payment and tokenization products for businesses, he added.

Ripio also plans to offer new savings and loan products for retail clients to reduce revenue volatility.

If corporate adoption plays out as Serrano thinks businesses could account for as much as 80% of revenue by the end of the decade.

Argentines have embraced crypto currencies, such as Bitcoin, like few other nations in Latin America due to years of rampant inflation and strict limits on the purchase of US dollars. Still, the nation’s uptake is threatened by President Javier Milei’s pledge to lift currency controls and dollarize the economy as soon as the central bank pays down its peso-denominated debts.

Read more: Bitcoin Is Trumping Dollars for Many Inflation-Weary Argentines

Serrano is skeptical that Argentine companies that have embraced crypto will abandon it after currency controls are gone.

“Maybe the rate of adoption will be slower, but companies are always looking for ways to improve costs and time and this technology is superior” to traditional payment methods, he said.

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