El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, has announced that he will soon present a bill 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 bill 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 giving 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 data, 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 one 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 website. But bitcoin's volatility and its dark legal status has raised doubts as to whether it can ever replace fiat currency in day-to-day transactions.