Venezuela: Simplified Crypto Access via Dash Text
To help combat the hyperinflation of the bolivar, a Venezuelan company now allows people to store their wealth in Dash and transact via SMS.
Recent hyperinflation of the Venezuelan bolivar has led to a massive demand for services that allow people to move their capital into other, more stable assets. Knowing this, the government of Venezuela has been keen on cracking down on fiat currency exchanges that operate in the black market.
Venezuelans who would prefer non-fiat currencies can always go to Localbitcoins.com, where the trading volume is growing immensely. Alternatively, those living and working outside the country’s borders can send remittances using Dash to their loved ones via SMS using Dash Text, a startup that just recently started allowing this service to be used in Venezuela’s Movistar telephone service.
“At Dash we understand that cross-border transactions are expensive and take long, and in Latin America, there is a clear possibility to help millions of people that need to send money home in any one of the remittance corridors. And Venezuela is a scenario in which Dash Text is also a great solution for the current situation; Venezuela has over 80% mobile phone penetration, over 50% of people have access to the internet, and recent migration has created large diasporas of migrants in almost all neighboring countries,” said Ernesto Contreras, development manager for Latin America at Dash, in a press release.
Currently, the Venezuelan government has an uneasy tolerance of cryptocurrencies. It has not indicated that it is all that threatened by the number of people who put their savings in crypto, as foreign exchange through black markets is still a go-to method for moving one’s capital away from the bolivar.
Perhaps another side of this particular coin is the fact that president Nicolas Maduro has long been touting his Petro project, a national cryptocurrency that is backed by oil and may soon even have its own central bank.
The circumstances behind the Petro are dubious, as the NEM-based token shows no evidence whatsoever that anyone ever seriously invested in it. And even if Maduro’s claims are true, it’s still a coin backed up by oil that PDVSA’s outdated and worn-out equipment won’t be able to extract without a massive capital injection.
All of this is relevant to the fate of cryptocurrencies in Venezuela; if the Petro fails and Maduro looks for a culprit, the open trade of cryptocurrencies in the country would be a good scapegoat. Citizens living inside its borders will just have to hope they can buy enough time to get their hands on a few coins so that they can have a stable store of value.
They may be volatile, but the losses they cause put parentheses in people’s banks accounts only half the time. At this point, anything is better than the bolivar.
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