SAN SALVADOR
— El Salvador may become the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender,
President Nayid Bukele announced Saturday, saying he would soon propose a bill
that could transform the remittance-dependent economy.
اضافة اعلان
The move
would make the Central American nation the first in the world to formally
accept the cryptocurrency as legal money and would “allow the financial
inclusion of thousands of people who are outside the legal economy,” Bukele
said.
“Next week,
I will send to Congress a bill that makes Bitcoin legal money,” the populist
leader said during a video message to the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami,
Florida.
The bill
aims to create jobs, he said, in a country where “70 percent of the population
does not have a bank account and works in the informal economy.”
The El
Salvador government is yet to give details of the bill, which will require
approval from a parliament dominated by the president’s allies.
Remittances
from Salvadorans working overseas represent a major chunk of the economy —
equivalent to roughly 22 percent of Gross Domestic Product.
In 2020,
remittances to the country totaled $5.9 billion, according to official reports.
According
to Bukele, Bitcoin represented “the fastest growing way to transfer” those
billions of dollars in remittances and to prevent millions from being lost to
intermediaries.
“Thanks to
the use of bitcoin, the amount received by more than a million low-income
families increases by several billion dollars every year,” said the president.
“This
improves life and the future of millions of people.”
The
cryptocurrency market grew to more than $2.5 trillion in mid-May 2020,
according to the Coinmarketcap page, driven by interest from increasingly
serious investors from Wall Street to
Silicon Valley.
But the
volatility of
Bitcoin — currently priced at $36,127 — and its murky legal
status has raised questions about whether it could ever replace fiat currency
in day-to-day transactions.
Read more business
.jpg)
.jpg)
