Latin America Hit Record For P2P Volume
Is Latin America providing insight into what we will see around the world?
Cryptocurrency is an alternative to the fiat system that is in place now. In fact, Bitcoin's creation was as a result of the last financial crisis that exposed weakness in the present system.
While adoption is slow, we are starting to see a great deal of progress.
The challenge is to find those areas that are willing to make the switch. Obviously, the biggest candidates will be those countries where fiat based currencies are failing the population.
To find a honey pot for this, one only needs to look at Latin America. Many countries there were experiencing financial hardship long before the coronavirus shut down the global economy. For this reason, many started to turn to cryptocurrency as an alternative.
P2P transaction volume reached record level in April.
Countries such as Venezuela, Columbia, and Argentina are all finding their situation dire.
Argentina set a record of $710,000 in transactions during the week of April 18th. This week saw a slight retracement to $670,000.
Colombia saw two consecutive weeks of $2.1 million and $2.6 million. This came after a record $27 million during a 7 day period from April 4th.
They same week, Chile saw $400,000. The last two weeks were $280,000 and $325,000.
To top it all off:
This past week saw Venezuelan trade on Localbitcoins post a new record for volume with $4.1 billion worth of BTC changing hands in seven days.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/latin-american-markets-post-record-p2p-volume-in-april
Venezuela has suffered more than any country in South America. The push towards digital currencies, most notably Bitcoin and Dash, started more than a year ago. This is why the volume is so high as compared to the other countries.
The question is are we going to see a repeat of this around the world. As the global economy enters a recession, there will be a lot more pain among countries that were suffered before the virus.
Of course, no country is really safe as the global economy collapses. This is going to create an environment of great uncertainty. Here is where we see confidence wane which could be death for some currencies.