- On Friday, after a week-long pilot in a popular LGBTQ+ neighborhood in Madrid, Spain, Maricoin officially launched.
- The coin’s name is an acronym that plays on a widely known anti-gay slur.
- Transfers between maricoin users will be referred to as “trans,” according to reports.
On Friday, after a week-long pilot test in a popular neighborhood LGBTQ+ In Madrid, Spain, Maricoin was officially launched.
The name of the coin is an acronym that plays on an insult anti gay widely known. Transfers between users of maricoin will be called “trans”, according to reports. But the founders of maricoin hope that the success of the business will empower the community.
“Since we run this economy, why shouldn’t our community benefit from it, rather than the banks, insurance companies, or large corporations that often fail to help LGBT+ people?” co-founder Juan Belmonte told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
The founders hope that maricoin will be used as a payment option for LGBTQ+ businesses around the world.
Everyone who wants to use it must sign the “equality manifesto” that defends the rights of LGBTQ+ people and all minorities. Those who have signed will be put on a map that will be available to LGBTQ+ travelers.
“If they violate any of the points of our anti-discrimination manifesto, for example if they fire a pregnant woman for her pregnancy, they will be expelled from maricoin,” CEO Francisco Álvarez told Thomson Reuters.
According to him, 8,000 people were on the waiting list to use maricoin. He is backed by Borderless Capital, a Miami-based venture capital firm.
Some on social media are criticizing the name.
Others have criticized the whole rush to try to “queer capitalism”.
Why are cryptocurrencies controversial?
Unlike traditional currencies, cryptocurrencies are not issued by any central bank or government and are privately operated. The best known, bitcoin, was first traded in 2009, its value jumping from just under 10 US cents to over $34,000 on the market. present.
Critics of digital currencies point to their volatility, saying their use could undermine authorities’ control over the global financial and monetary systems, increase systemic risk, encourage white-collar crime and hurt investors.
“Some of these currencies have been used for money laundering (and) tax reporting issues often arise,” David Yermack, a finance professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, told the Thomson Foundation. Reuters.
“It’s at the very least inconvenient to do business with these coins if you’re trying to comply with regular law,” he said.
However, the adoption of cryptocurrencies as an asset and as a payment vehicle has grown between the youngest investors and in countries developing countries, and proponents say they are an effective hedge against hyperinflation and uncertainty.
And what about the controversy over maricoin?
Hundreds of social media users they criticized the name of the Spanish cryptocurrency and said that it was disrespectful towards the LGBT+ community, since they established parallels with the English homophobic insult “faggot”.
Others said such criticism was unwarranted, pointing to how gay men had reappropriated the Spanish word “maricón.”
Maricoin co-founders Juan Belmonte and Francisco Alvarez said some people had misunderstood their choice of name.
“We want to resignify the insult. That is intimately linked to what Pride means. And we are not the first to do it,” said Álvarez, CEO of maricoin.
Critics also voiced opposition to the initiative’s goal of targeting LGBT+ people as users, citing broader concerns about the risk of cryptocurrencies.
Can an LGBT+ Cryptocurrency Succeed?
More than 10,000 people have joined a waiting list looking to buy premium maricoins before the coin begins trading, the founders said.
According to their plans, the currency will be accepted as payment in businesses that have signed an anti-discrimination manifesto.
The global LGBT+ market is huge, with Swiss bank research Credit Suisse which suggests it would rank as the world’s fourth largest economy, behind Japan but ahead of Germany in terms of purchasing power.
But Yermack said the fact that potential users of maricoin (LGBT+ people and their allies) constitute a minority group spread across different countries could make it difficult for virtual currency to gain traction.
“What is really needed is a large number of people to adapt the currency as quickly as possible,” he said.
A similar initiative launched in 2018 by the social network Hornet created the cryptocurrency LGBT Token, but its founders they decided in 2020 to refocus the project as a payment wallet without cryptocurrencies only for the users of the application.
“We realized that 99% of our users didn’t care if it was crypto, they wanted it to be easy to use. They wanted a wallet, but they didn’t want to have to remember passwords,” said the Hornet boss. Executive Christoff Wittig.
“Cryptotechnology itself did not create enough value for our users,” he said.
Wittig added, however, that he thought there was scope for an LGBT+ cryptocurrency like maricoin to succeed.
“A decentralized technology like crypto is a perfect match, in principle, for a decentralized community like ours.”
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