Crypto adoption has ballooned in Venezuela and Argentina this year, claim industry players.
In Venezuela, the CEO of one of the nation’s most active crypto exchanges, Cryptobuyer, has claimed that the unspecified number of bitcoin (BTC) payments made in the nation is doubling every month.
Speaking in an interview with Criptonoticias, Cryptobuyer chief Jorge Farías also claimed,
“The coronavirus pandemic has made it more necessary than ever to develop an alternative payment system, including contactless and remote payment solutions.”
The exchange boss claimed that his firm had gone on a hiring spree to cope with the rise in demand for crypto pay, doubling the size of its staff “not only at the development level but also in [its] technical support and customer service departments.”
The claim comes after a bumper year for the exchange, which has signed a string of crypto pay deals with some of the country’s biggest retailers and service providers. The firm provides a point-of-sale solution that allows merchants to accept payments in bitcoin and a number of altcoins.
The most recent deal involved the Venezuelan hotel chain Hoteles Sunsol, which last week signed on to accept crypto pay via the exchange’s payment gateway – following on from an announcement late last month that all Pizza Hut outlets in the nation would also use Cryptobuyer solutions to enable crypto pay.
Meanwhile, elsewhere on the continent, the number of BTC investors in Argentina has increased by 300% in 2020, claimed Maximiliano Hinz, Binance’s head of operations for Latin America, without specifying.
Speaking to media outlet Télam, Hinz claimed that investors turning to crypto were overwhelmingly choosing bitcoin or a small group of big-name altcoins, but added that thousands of Argentinians this year had turned to crypto as a “savings option.”
However, Magdiela Rivas, Paxful’s Latin America management consultant told the same media outlet that “the main interest in Argentina” was stablecoins, as many believe they “allow unlimited digital dollarization” – in a nation where dollar buying has been capped in a bid to stave off skyrocketing inflation.
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