So the first Bitcoin and crytocurrency news that I will be talking about today relates to South Africa.
For weeks I have been talking about how South Africa’s continual adoption of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies continue to grow. And I believe this is due to the continual worsening of its economic and political landscape that we hear on the news. So quite frankly, I am not surprised that the Bitcoin adoption is extremely huge here.
With it’s fallen currency, the Rand, folks are seamlessly tapping into anything that can hold value within this region. And if folks are not already aware of this piece of news or information is that South Africa has a credit rating of “junk” which basically makes it less favorable and risky for foreign investors to invest in the country.
The rest of the information that I will be presenting comes from an article from Coin Telegraph’s writer Darryn Pollock and I’ll have links to the article as I always do below. It mentions how the amount of users have grown by 100,000 people within South Africa’s top two cryptocurrency exchanges Luno and Ice3x. Ice3x founder Gareth Grobler (shown below) stated by saying “although this figure is tiny, especially in comparison to Asia, it is a positive step for the digital currency in one of the most forward thinking African nations.”
And I’ve recently covered Ic3x here on this channel. Luno’s marketing officer Werner Van Rooyen (shown below) is quoted by saying, “We see it in many ways, not just from our internal metrics including new customers, active users, application downloads, trading volumes and interest from banks and institutional investors but also from other places: trading volumes that keep growing, increased merchant activity, increased understanding by investors regulators and banks, press coverage, and the number of Google searches about Bitcoin.”
And from a recent post I did covering South Africa, even their own federal reserve are starting a sandbox experiment to look into the impact of cryptocurrency in its markets and to learn about its uses. And quite personally, I think one has to be a little suspicious about this sandbox experiment given this country’s uncertainty. But I digress. My whole point of covering this article is to talk about how South Africa’s retailers have been taken steps even much further by accepting Bitcoin. Two of the well known online retailers are Takealot and Bidorbuy. Both websites function like Ebay and Amazon. In addition, certain charities are even starting to accept Bitcoin like the Nelson Mandela Children’s Fund. The CMO, Chief Marketing Officer, Declan Hollywood (shown below) of Takealot, remarked by saying that they have started to see on average of about 170% growth per year of Bitcoin transactions. And so to conclude with this segment of this news, folks in finance typically say “the trend is your friend”. And right now unless the South African Rand awakens from the dead, the Bitcoin adoption is still up.
Obviously all this is good for Bitcoin. And I think the competition should at least encourage the South African Financial Reserve to step up their game with good economic policies.
You can find related material to the following source:
https://cointelegraph.com/news/south-africans-make-bitcoin-work-for-them-as-currency-store-of-wealth
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