(ANSA) - SAN SALVADOR, JUN 06 - The President of El Salvador, Nayid Bukele, has announced that he will soon present a draft law to legalize bitcoin and make his country the first in the world to use cryptocurrency as a real currency.
"Next week I will send Congress a draft law to make bitcoin legal," the populist leader said in a video message to the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, Florida. The project aims to create jobs in a country where "70 percent of the population does not have a bank account and works illegally", explained the president without providing any other details.
Remittances from Salvadorans working abroad represent an important slice of El Salvador's economy, equivalent to about 22% of the gross domestic product and, according to official figures, in 2020 amounted to 5.9 billion dollars. According to Bukele, bitcoins were "the fastest way to transfer" those billions of dollars in remittances and prevent "millions from being lost in intermediaries". "Thanks to the use of bitcoin, the amount received by over a million low-income families increases by several billion dollars every year," the president said.
The cryptocurrency market grew to over $ 2.5 trillion last year, according to the Coinmarketcap site. But bitcoin's volatility and its legal obscurostatus has raised doubts as to whether it can actually replace fiat currency in day-to-day transactions.
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