- “Bitcoin Valley” will be deployed in the tourist city of Santa Lucía, a small town located in the mountains 20 minutes from Tegucigalpa.
- With the support of universities and the government, merchants will be trained to learn to deal with Bitcoin and receive this cryptocurrency as a form of payment.
- They warn about the risks derived from the volatility of Bitcoin and about the increase in the digital divide that its use implies.
El Salvador was the first country to land directly in the world of cryptocurrencies by passing a law that made Bitcoin legal tender.
Since then, the value of Bitcoin has fallen by more than 50 percent, leading some of the major credit rating agencies to describe El Salvador’s debt as one of the weakest in the world.
This is so because the president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, decided to invest part of the reserves in the purchase of Bitcoin. His published holdings of $105 million are now worth about $57 million.
One of the initiatives of El Salvador to consolidate itself in the crypto world was to found BitcoinCitythe first city financed with cryptocurrency-backed bonds.
Honduran and Bitcoin
Following the trend of El Salvador, now it is the turn of its neighbor Honduras.
Although that country has not decided to make Bitcoin legal tender (it will not go that far), the idea is to establish a tourism project closely related to the most famous cryptocurrency.
The project will be developed in St. Luciaa small town in the mountains just 20 minutes from the capital Tegucigalpa.
There, with the support of the government, business and store owners from all market segments in St. Lucia are adapting to receive payments in cryptocurrencies in the hope of attracting more tourism.
The goal of the so-called “Bitcoin Valley” is for the project to become an opportunity to attract more people to visit the city.
“Cryptotourism” in Honduras
It will start with 60 stores, whose owners are being trained to receive Bitcoin as a means of payment. They will then extend the initiative to more businesses and more cryptocurrencies.
The medium-term objective is to extend these practices to more companies and nearby areas.
The initiative was developed jointly by the Blockchain Honduras organization, the Guatemalan cryptocurrency exchange consortium Coincaex, the Technological University of Honduras and the Municipality of Santa Lucía.
As Rubén Carbajal Velázquez, a professor at the Technological University, told the media, “The objective is to generate a new business linked to crypto tourism in the region.”
The closest thing that has been developed in this sense in Latin America is what El Salvador did with “Bitcoin Beach”, in the city of El Zonte, where it generated tourist interest around accepting crypto as a means of payment.
To deal with volatility, the “Bitcoin Valley” of Honduras will allow merchants to receive bitcoin payments that will instantly be converted into local currency, eliminating the risks of cryptocurrency fluctuation.
Critics of the expansion of bitcoin have warned that this type of operation can fuel money laundering and financial instability, while increasing the digital divide.
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