South America is in the news again; this time not due to a virally spreading pandemic, the inflation rates going out of control, the continent’s crime reports, or illegal businesses such as the drug mafia.
An entirely new chain of events getting triggered by its hyper-adoption of cryptocurrency is creating new ripples of worries for South American regulatory authorities, even as they have not fully tightened the screws around a bubbling bitcoin economy.
In order to ease cashing out of cryptocurrency funds, P2P marketplaces such as Vertex and Paxful, among many others, had enabled platforms for people to sell large volumes of bitcoin in exchange of fiat currencies.
However, most countries in South America are witnessing an all-time high in volumes of cryptocurrency trading. The graph has literally exponentiated after maintaining a seemingly low profile between 2013 and 2017, with a steady rise since the last 2 years.
Whether this is owing to the panic related to coronavirus led an economic downturn or not is yet to be ascertained. The situation is worsened with steep inflation rates’ rise, which has hit hard the currency values of Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Mexico, Chile, and Brazil, among others, reaching alarming figures in July since end of 2019.
Government measures, such as Venezuelan President Maduro’s initiatives of rent and wage freeze or airdrop of cryptocurrency for doctors, have not really succeeded instilling public confidence that the pandemic will subside, and the economy will level up again.
Recently reported news on global currencies taking a hit on the lines of the US dollar, have roughed up worries further with people settling for whatever cash value they get in exchange for their bitcoins, as the economy heads for a struggle in coming months.
