BTC massifies in Venezuela as a measure of financial coverage
Venezuelans take refuge in the cryptocurrency to face the economic crisis that crosses the country, quickly and efficiently
This February Venezuela was positioned as the second country in the world with the highest number of transactions accounting for 2,004 bitcoins (BTC), equivalent to 17.3 billion bolívares. This behavior shows that the most popular cryptocurrency in the world has had a broad growth and acceptance by Venezuelans.
Jorge Kamenar, manager of corporate finance and investment strategies at Intelinvest, explains that this phenomenon is due to the fact that the Venezuelan currency has lost the most important properties of money in recent years, which is why the use of digital currencies has become a financial alternative for citizens.
“It is a necessity every day for Venezuelans to obtain mechanisms that allow them to face hyperinflation. What people have done all their lives as a mechanism of shelter and savings, in the face of economic distortions, is to buy dollars, but in the absence or bureaucratic difficulty of entering an orderly market to carry out these transactions in the country, they began to perform their transactions through the bitcoin dollar“, he says.
“Among the lost properties we can highlight the deposit of value, due to the daily devaluation suffered by the sovereign bolivar due to exchange control, people have been forced to invest their bolivars in order to protect their assets or wealth and thus be able to make future purchases. That is why they have grown, as an alternative, the Bitcoins (BTC), where people buy to protect their capital.“
Kamenar ensures that today there is a platform called Local Bitcoin, which works quite well, in which people offer their BTC in exchange for bolívares or vice versa, in this way avoiding having to use official rates or look for dollars in the unofficial market.
“In Venezuela, currently, at this precise moment, the BTC is being used as a reference to the price of the dollar with the sovereign bolivar, where the citizens fix the price of the dollar for their transactions using reference as the BTC is in dollars and BTC rates in bolívares from platforms like Local Bitcoin.”
He adds that due to the demand that is currently present in the market, the BTC in Venezuela has also become one of the most expensive in the world, where there is even talk that the price “is 15% higher than the average.”
“Venezuela is one of the three countries in the world that commercializes more BTC in P2P platforms worldwide, surpassing even the United States in November 2018. This responds to the low energy costs in the country, making our nation one of the most profitable places to be able to mine, which causes that the volume of BTC increases.”
He argues that one of the peculiarities of Bitcoin is that it materializes, makes real, a natural market, both on the demand side and on the supply side.
“So here anyone can buy or sell Bitcoins, accessing money easily. Then, people demand Bitcoin to be able to have liquidity in their daily operations. For that reason they have opted for this market, as a way to obtain and manage money quickly.”
Rafael Arias / BitFinance.News
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