That’s it, a real crypto-nation – Since El Salvador made history by becoming the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender, all the media spotlight has been on this small Central American country. It must be said that Salvadorans had already for some time started to adopt the king of cryptos.
Bitcoin for international transfers without expensive intermediaries
The relation between Bitcoin (BTC) and the Salvador didn’t start all of a sudden when Here’s to watching, president of the country, announced that he would make the invention of Satoshi Nakamoto a national currency.
As a Reuters analysis indicates, Salvadorans expatriates have indeed been using Bitcoin for quite a long time. as a way to transfer their money in the country. The volumes of these transfers have, moreover, particularly exploded since the start of 2021.
Monthly bitcoin transfers of less than $ 1,000 (mainly from expatriates in the United States) have quadruplets for 1 year, going from 424 000 dollars in May 2020 to more than 1,7 million de dollars this May 2021, according to data from Chainalysis.
BTC transfers even peaked at $ 2.5 million in March 2021, and this has also been the case in several Central American countries.
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Thanks to Bitcoin, knowledgeable Salvadorans have found a fast and cheap way to send money across borders, without expensive intermediaries helping himself generously in passing.
There remains, however, a large educational work to be done so that Salvadorans benefit more massively from the opportunity that Bitcoin represents, since the total remittances represented $ 6 billion in 2019.
With its Bitcoin Law, El Salvador is on track to set an example in the region, with the addition of the recently acquired support of BCIE, a kind of large supranational bank in Central America. The only obstacle standing on the first “bitcoinization” of a country: the IMF threatens El Salvador not to pay it certain promised aid because of its choice.
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