El Salvador to make bitcoin legal
El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele said on Saturday that he will send a bill to Congress next week to make bitcoin legal tender in the Central American nation, touting its potential to help Salvadorans living abroad send remittances home.
“In the short term this will generate jobs and help provide financial inclusion to thousands outside the formal economy,” Bukele said in a video shown at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami.
Strike, a mobile payments app that launched in El Salvador in March, said in a statement that it welcomed the legislation and was working with the country to make using bitcoin technology a success.
“This is the shot heard ‘round the world’ for bitcoin,” Strike founder and CEO Jack Mallers, who introduced Bukele’s video, was quoted as saying at the Miami conference.
“Adopting a natively digital currency as legal tender provides El Salvador the most secure, efficient and globally integrated open payments network in the world,” he said.
Bukele took to Twitter to call promoting financial inclusion “a moral imperative” as well as path to growing El Salvador’s economy by providing access to credit, savings, investment and secure transactions.
On the issue of remittances, Bukele said that currently “a big chunk of those US$6 billion is lost to intermediaries. By using Bitcoin, the amount received by more than a million low income families will increase in the equivalent of billions of dollars every year.”
He pointed out that 70 percent of El Salvador’s population does not have a bank account and works in the informal economy. “This will improve lives and the future of millions,” said Bukele.
- About Us
- |
- Terms of Use
- |
- RSS
- |
- Privacy Policy
- |
- Contact Us
- |
- Shanghai Call Center: 962288
- |
- Tip-off hotline: 52920043
- 沪ICP证:沪ICP备05050403号-1
- |
- 互联网新闻信息服务许可证:31120180004
- |
- 网络视听许可证:0909346
- |
- 广播电视节目制作许可证:沪字第354号
- |
- 增值电信业务经营许可证:沪B2-20120012
Copyright © 1999- Shanghai Daily. All rights reserved.Preferably viewed with Internet Explorer 8 or newer browsers.