Nubank

Nubank is Latin America's largest digital financial services platform and one of the biggest retail access points for Solana (SOL) in the region, offering its 130-plus million customers the ability to buy, sell, swap, and self-custody SOL inside the same app they use to pay bills and manage savings. Founded in Sao Paulo in 2013 by David Velez, Cristina Junqueira, and Edward Wible, the company set out to dismantle Brazil's entrenched banking oligopoly with a zero-fee digital credit card controlled entirely from a smartphone. It has since expanded into a full financial super-app operating across Brazil, Mexico, and Colombia, with products spanning credit cards, checking accounts, personal loans, investments, insurance, and cryptocurrency. The company went public on the NYSE in December 2021 as NU Holdings and counts Berkshire Hathaway among its major institutional investors; as of mid-2026 Nubank has surpassed 131 million customers and committed BRL 45 billion in Brazil for the year, focused on AI, product expansion, and financial inclusion. Crypto access runs through Nubank Cripto, an integrated trading and custody service embedded in the main app. Users access it via the Planejamento tab and transact in reais, with crypto settled via infrastructure partner Paxos — a regulated blockchain company whose custody layer means customer holdings sit on segregated institutional-grade infrastructure rather than on Nubank's balance sheet. The entry threshold is intentionally low: Solana can be purchased starting from one Brazilian real (roughly twenty US cents), removing the barrier that whole-coin pricing creates for first-time buyers. By early 2025 the platform supported BTC, ETH, SOL, XRP, USDC, UNI, ADA, NEAR, ATOM, and ALGO. Key features include a crypto swap tool (BTC, ETH, SOL, or UNI into USDC and back at reduced fees), external wallet transfers for BTC, ETH, and SOL added in April 2024 enabling customers to move SOL to wallets like Phantom or Backpack, price alerts at 3%, 6%, and 9% thresholds, and a Ganhar Cripto rewards feature offering an annualized rate on held positions. Nubank Cripto saw 1,500% growth in transaction volume from March 2023 to March 2024 alongside a 56% increase in active crypto customers. Separately, in 2023 Nubank launched Nucoin, a loyalty token on Polygon (not Solana) with 100 billion total supply; 80% goes to customers via airdrops, cashback, and engagement rewards, and holders receive discounts and perks within the Nubank ecosystem but cannot withdraw tokens externally. Nubank is not a Solana-native protocol and does not deploy on-chain programs. Its relationship with Solana is as a distribution channel: one of Latin America's largest regulated institutions has made SOL a first-class tradeable and transferable asset for 130-plus million people — the majority first-generation crypto users. The April 2024 external transfer feature is the critical link: a Nubank customer can accumulate SOL in the app, move it to a self-custody wallet to participate in Solana DeFi or staking, then sell back to reais through Nubank, making it one of the most practical fiat-to-Solana corridors available to Latin American retail users today.