«It will bring financial inclusion, investment, tourism, innovation and economic development for our country,» El Salvador’s president said.
El Salvador will adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender in the country, becoming the first in the world to formally embrace the volatile as such. The Latin American country’s congress voted overwhelmingly in favor of the law late Tuesday, pushing forward Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele’s proposal. The 39-year-old politician’s party holds a supermajority in El Salvador’s congress. «It will bring financial inclusion, investment, tourism, innovation and economic development for our country,» Bukele said before the vote. The move also brings financial risks to ordinary Salvadorans and their country, experts say, as the cryptocurrency gains and loses huge amounts of value in a flash – and at times overnight. The U.S. dollar is the country’s official currency and El Salvador’s economy depends heavily on money sent back from abroad. According to World Bank data, these so-called remittances to the country made up nearly $6 billion — or almost 20% of its gross domestic product in 2019. On Sunday, Bukele tweeted that a «huge chunk» of that $6 billion is lost to intermediaries who take a cut of the financial transactions in dollars. Instead, he believes Bitcoin could be «the fastest growing way to transfer six billion dollars a year in remittances.
