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Encouraging Crypto Mass Adoption in Venezuela: A Way Around Maduro’s Financial Fire Wall

Extroverting by Brandon Possin
6 min readJan 27, 2020

Learning how to manage cryptoassets could give a way for Venezuela’s opposition to use a dictatorship-resistant financial system, receive donations from Diaspora abroad, channel money quickly to pro-democracy activists, and not be hurt from the illegitimate Maduro regime’s bank account freezes. Just as importantly, cryptoasset use could give suffering Venezuelans a low-cost way to receive remittances so they don’t pay 5–30% in commissions.

Yet for all of electronic money and cryptofinance’s gains in Venezuela, adoption remains far from being a viable alternative to sovereign bolivar (VES) and physical USD daily use. Possible approaches to take to encourage more adoption have come into view:

Photo credit: Eltelégrafo.ec
  1. Commission to Merchants

Give commission to those merchants accepting cryptopayments for a set period, thus incentivizing crypto use. This could especially encourage stablecoin use — such as DAI stablecoins. This is similar to PayPal’s historic $10 giveaway to new users in the early 2000s. One possible partner is Xpay.cash which is reportedly taking 3.99% commission from merchants. If desired, GiveCrypto could cover that commission and top up so that merchants have a financial incentive to accept crypto instead of fiat currency. Merchants could pass on some of…

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Extroverting by Brandon Possin
Extroverting by Brandon Possin

Written by Extroverting by Brandon Possin

Blog on making the most of opportunities, especially in emerging tech and being extroverted. By the founder of a science fintech startup in Japan, Merito.

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