Enabling stock trading for millions of users at Bitso
Bitso is Latin America's leading cryptocurrency platform and the region's first crypto unicorn. With over 10 million users and billions of dollars in transactions processed, Bitso has become a cornerstone of digital finance across Latin America. Bitso Business, the company's B2B segment, serves over 2,200 institutional customers and provides infrastructure that supports tens of billions of dollars in domestic and international payments.
Building on this success, Bitso is expanding beyond crypto into traditional financial markets. The company now enables users to trade U.S. Stocks and ETFs directly within its platform, bridging local currencies, digital assets, and global equities. This expansion aligns with Bitso's mission to offer users a unified financial experience across all asset classes.
Cryptocurrency markets operate 24/7 by default, but U.S. equity market hours are much more fragmented. For Bitso's engineering and product teams, ensuring continuous, accurate market coverage for users across multiple Latin American time zones presented a major technical challenge.
Bitso needed a data provider cable of:
- Delivering real-time and extended hours U.S. equity data
- Maintaining institutional-grade accuracy with low latency
- Supporting scalable API access for high-volume retail applications
- Integrating seamlessly with their existing tech stack
Legacy market data vendors presented significant friction. Lengthy implementation timelines, complex licensing processes, and rigid infrastructure requirements would delay innovation and time-to-market for a fast-scaling fintech like Bitso.
Databento's US Equities datasets provide the comprehensive, flexible coverage Bitso needs. Bitso integrated Databento's market data to power its trading platform.
This implementation centered on several key capabilities:
Comprehensive extended hours coverage: Databento provides direct access to Cboe EDGX and other U.S. equity venues, ensuring coverage during pre-market and post-market sessions. As a result, Bitso can display accurate price discovery data for users trading outside of traditional exchange hours, a key requirement for multi-time-zone retail customers.
Fast, flexible integration: Databento's platform and documentation enabled Bitso's engineering team to integrate market data quickly and begin development without the lengthy implementation process typical of traditional market data vendors.
Schemas for every use case: Databento ingests entire venue feeds directly from the source and handles the normalization to over 15 different schemas, so applications can pull data at any desired granularity without requiring time-consuming data transformation.
Since launching commission-free U.S. stock and ETF trading, Bitso has seen exponential double-digit growth in its investment product.
Databento provides the real-time prices users see when placing trades, helping increase access to investing in a region where only 2 to 3% of the population currently participates in the stock market.
