- In Jeriquaquara, a small municipality located in the northeast of Brazil, a project inspired by Bitcoin Beach El Salvador, known as Bitcoin Beach Brazil, is being developed.
- The project began by helping merchants to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment and evolved into an educational approach with which it sought to help them learn to save money and use it as a tool for financial inclusion.
- Jeriquaquara is one of the main tourist destinations in Brazil and one of the 10 most beautiful beaches in the world.
Brazil is the fifth largest country in the world and is ranked seventh in number of inhabitants, with more than 215 million citizens. In such a vast territory and with such a large number of citizens, there are all kinds of realities. Few with a lot of money and many with little, as is the case in Mexico, for example.
In search of a better reality, on the beaches of Jeriquaquara they started a Bitcoin project.
Bitcoin Beach Brazil
Bitcoin Beach Brazil is a project inspired by Bitcoin Beach El Salvadorinstalled one hour from the capital San Salvador, in the El Zonte region. The country, the first to make BTC a legal tender, implemented the digital asset as a way of life by bringing it closer to a population with few resources and reaching the traditional economy.
Fernando Motolese, creator of the project, pointed out that he saw what was happening in the El Zonte region as a result of El Salvador adopting Bitcoin as legal tender, so he decided to replicate the project in Jeriquaquara, a small municipality located in the northeast of Brazil. , in the state of Ceará.
The project that emerged on September 7, 2021, began by helping merchants to accept Bitcoin as a form of payment and evolved into an educational approach with which it sought to help them learn to save money and use it as a tool for financial inclusion.
“One of our big initiatives was to share our Lightning implementation at www.github.com/praiabitcoin/bancobitcoin. There you can see all the code that we used, like what we did here to use Lightning and also to have a sovereign implementation of Bitcoin to serve our communityMotolese pointed out.
Jeriquaquar, new crypto destination
Jeriquaquara is a virgin beach hidden behind some doubts in the Ceará region, north of Brazil and almost 2,800 kilometers from Rio de Janeiro. In 1984, The Washington Post Magazine chose it as one of the 10 most beautiful beaches in the world.
Motolese will tell part of the experience in the book he is writing (“Bitcoin Standard Circular Economy”), which he will seek to serve as an educational manual.
“I intend to help communities start this path of replicating the Bitcoin Beach experiment in the Brazilian model, which is a little different, and in this book I intend to teach communities to replicate our initiative,” he stressed.
Along with Bitcoin Beach, Motolese launched a project to bring BTC closer to schools. There was a donation of 0.1 BTC, an amount that was distributed among students and teachers in the area. As the site highlights Bitcoin Magazine“408 wallets with 1,000 satoshis in paper wallets were delivered”.
In turn, each of them also received a t-shirt, a returnable water bottle and a piggy bank with coins from the project. Also a lesson on what Bitcoin is and how a paper wallet should be used, the one that is secure and works offline.
“The school librarian told me that the computers in the computer room hadn’t worked for two years. So I talked to the director and told him to let me fundraise to fix them. So we started an approach. I posted online that I needed resources. The people of Bitcoin Beach donated 0.1 BTC to us. So with this donation we fix the computers and also activate the accounts.”highlighted Motolese.
The t-shirts that the children received were made in the region and paid for in Bitcoin, demonstrating the capacity of the cryptocurrency as a form of payment. “We intend to launch some locally made Bitcoin Beach products to be sold and fund a part of the project there,” she added.
Brazil: stocks grow with cryptocurrencies
The company’s cryptocurrency adoption rate Finder places Brazil in ninth place among the countries that use digital assets the most. It is estimated that 17% of the population has already adopted them.
The top 10 are made up of: India (29%), Nigeria (27%), Vietnam (24%), Australia (22%), Ghana (20%), Singapore (20%), Hong Kong (18%), Venezuela (18%), Brazil (17%) and Indonesia (16%). Mexico, meanwhile, is also at the top with 13% of the population close to digital assets.
Brazil already has its first Bitcoin Beach. If it works, the project could expand along the entire coast of the territory.
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