El Salvador is now considered the hub of crypto adoption among South American countries. It has indeed adopted Bitcoin as a form of legal tender; it is the only country to do so to date as no other country could go through with this transition. Both the IMF and World Bank advised against this, but El Salvador was bent on moving forward with Bitcoin that it implemented the cryptocurrency as a legal tender anyway.
Since then, the country has had to deal with a lot of infrastructural and technological issues around Bitcoin payments, its transition towards the common people, and administering Bitcoin as a form of payment option among the merchants throughout the country. Anyway, the state thought of the most innovative way of dealing with this whole thing by developing a Bitcoin wallet that is controlled by the government.
El Salvador’s Most Downloaded App
The Chivo wallet has now reached 500,000 users; as we speak, it has become the most downloaded app within the country. This is because the state did play its cards right around Bitcoin adoption and its marketing; it was advertised that if a user successfully registers himself on the Chivo Bitcoin wallet app, then he will be awarded $30 in the form of Bitcoin within the wallet.
Many people taking this as an initiative downloaded the wallet and registered themselves, they did earn $30 in the form of Bitcoin, but the state is the real winner here. Because it now has the record of all those people who have, in fact, registered themselves on the wallet and are currently using it. This provides the state with clear analytics of how many people are using the Bitcoin wallet and what new strategies or incentives they should propose to engage the rest.
For example, foreigners are completely exempt from paying taxes on using Bitcoin as a form of payment for buying things, and also, they don’t even have to pay capital gains tax around Bitcoin in the case of earning a handsome profit in the market. These are all the different efforts El Salvador is implementing to make Bitcoin mainstream.
