Venezuela’s Passport Agency Trials Bitcoin For Application Payments

Venezuela’s passport agency started a new temporary service which allows passport applicants to pay using Bitcoin, as it can be seen on their website today. In our Bitcoin news today, we read more about the new option.

Venezuela’s passport agency and the government of the country briefly allowed passport applicants to pay applications with Bitcoin this week. The option was seen on SAIME, which is the administrative service for identification, migration, and foreigners. A few social media users including one on Twitter revealed the new feature by posting a few screenshots. The Confirmation of Bitcoin payments took more than eight minutes based on the user reports. The payments were accepted through the payment processor BTCPay Server and it seems that the option was introduced because of the suspension on credit card payments but it is also possible that this was an unrelated event.

Bitcoin payments were removed just a few hours after they got introduced according to the user reports. The Venezuelan Journalist Marbellis Linares denied that the payment option was actually available stating that “it is not functional, the information is false.” However, it comes as a surprise as the screenshots were made during payment progress which is now circulating online. Some users have suggested that the option was never available to Venezuelan users only to foreign users that have already applied for passports externally.

Venezuela has been a huge cryptocurrency hotspot because of the fact that there’s massive hyperinflation affecting the nation’s fiat currency, the Venezuelan bolivar. The statistics show that the users in the country are among the highest-volume buyers and sellers on LocalBitcoins. The businesses in the country such as Church’s Chicken and Burger King have also partnered with Dash. On the other hand, the critics suggest that adoption is far more exaggerated and insist that the government controls all of the crypto activity. The critics also noted that the government of Venezuela cracked down on crypto exchanges and seized all Bitcoin miners.

As previously reported, more and more Venezuelans are selling the Petro cryptocurrency which was recently airdropped to them at half the official price. Even though the government claims to have fixed the value of one PTR at $60, many people are apparently selling the cryptocurrency on LocalBitcoins at around $30 to $40.