The country of El Salvador is working on creating a bill that will recognize Bitcoin as legal tender, confirmed the president of the country, Nayib Bukele. The bill will be submitted next week.
This was confirmed by Jack Mallers of Zap during the Bitcoin 2021 conference which took place in Miami. He further added that Zap is collaborating with Bukele for the plan.
The bill has to be reviewed by the legislative assembly of El Salvador. There is a very high chance that the bill will pass since Bukele’s upstart political party controls the body.
“As of now, El Salvador is set to be the first bitcoin country. And the first country to make bitcoin legal tender and treat it as a world currency and have bitcoin on their reserves,” declared Mallers.
Then again, it is a bit hard to tell what becoming “the first bitcoin country” will mean for El Salvador, a country fiscally unstable and oppressively poor. 70% of the country’s citizens don’t have a banking account. El Salvador had a GDP of $24.6 billion in 2020.
The president declared that the plan will come with short-term benefits for thousands of people who don’t have a bank account and that it will generate jobs. He further added: “And in the medium and long term, we hope that this decision can help us push humanity, at least a tiny bit into the right direction.”
Mallers declared that this decision means the country is fighting “unprecedented monetary expansion,” and blamed the US Federal Reserve for “crushing emerging markets.”
The statement from Bukele was similar, as he declared: “Central banks are increasingly taking actions that may cause harm to the economic stability of El Salvador. In order to mitigate the negative impact from central banks, it becomes necessary to authorize the circulation of a digital currency with a supply that cannot be controlled by any central bank and is only altered in accord with objective and calclable criteria.”
The plan of the country is in contrast with many of the world’s central banks who are, instead, working on a CBDC.