Venezuela’s Maduro Plans A Digital Currency Surprise

Venezuela’s Maduro plans a digital currency surprise and the country could soon start the development on the digital bolivar so let’s find out more in our latest cryptocurrency news.

Nicholas Maduro dropped the news on the digital bolivar that is in the works in Venezuela but more details about the project are unknown. Regional experts explained what we can expect with the new surprise. Venezuela’s Maduro plans a new surprise as his team is working on something new that will raise the eyebrows among crypto traders and market observers. At the moment, it doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the state-backed cryptocurrency dubbed as the Petro. Like many of the previous announcements, very little is known as he said:

“It is a surprise that we will announce later.”

The moves come after many efforts to stabilize the economy and in the past few months, Venezuela lifted currency exchange controls, raising the price of the US dollar in the country to match the price of the one established on the black market thus allowing citizens to establish bank accounts in dollars even though the transactions are processed in the bolivar. CTO of blockchain.tech Fernando Medina said that the digital bolivar will be a full-fledged central bank currency considering that Petro doesn’t have the status of legal tender. Looking at it from a constitutional level, the bolivar is a legal tender as he said:

“At a constitutional level, the bolivar is the legal tender, I see [the digital bolivar] as an evolution of that monetary cone that has had so many problems at the level of cash issuance.”

Others think that the digital bolivar will be used to dollarize the economy and try to have more financial stability, as Ray Falconi said, as a member of the National Cryptocurrency Association:

“Others, however, think a digital bolivar will be used to dollarize the economy in an attempt to gain financial stability. It could be possible to convert the digital dollars handled by the banks and pay with our digital coin with any bank. That’s why the government is conducting a first step of opening dollar accounts: to be able to capture cash and digital currency and convert it to a token backed with those dollars.”

The president of the Association argued that in the future Petro and the digital bolivar will co-exist and the government will be able to decide to use one for domestic transactions and others for international transactions.