Another “Bitcoin Valley”, Now in Honduras!
The first bitcoin-friendly town launched in Santa Lucia, Honduras. As of 29th July, 60 merchants start officially accepting bitcoin in the tourist town close to the capital Tegucigalpa.
Under advice of the University of Technology of Honduras, a full-month program of bitcoin education was rolled out for the business owners, in order to help them deploy the new payment options for tourists.
This collaborative project, is inclusive of three other parties, the municipality of the mountainous tourism resort city, Santa Lucia, the Blockchain Honduras organization, and Coincaex, a Guatemalan exchange.
The program intends to foster Bitcoin adoption by training 60 enterprises. The merchants now are going to offer their products and services tagged with bitcoin, in addition to U.S. dollars and the local currency.
Honduran publication La Prensa has quoted local business owner Cesar Andino in Santa Luica, expecting globalization, a rise in sales, and a spread in their market:
“Accepting bitcoin will allow us to open another market and win more customers. We have to globalize. We cannot close ourselves off from technology, and we cannot be left behind when other countries are already doing it.”
According to La Prensa, the buyers can see the real-time prices in BTC, and they are able to pay with this medium by sending them to Coincaex. On the other hand, the sellers would receive Lempira, the legal tender of Honduras, which would define the exchange at the point of sale.
“The community of Saint Lucia will be trained on how to use and handle cryptocurrency, applying them in regional companies and developing crypto-tourism.” Professor Ruben Carbajal Velazquez of the Technological University described. The university’s incentives can be followed in their past project, aspiring to spike the tourism figures in the country, this time akin to the El Salvadoran model.
The popularity of Bitcoin could have been ignited by the 30% spike in tourism industry numbers in El Salvador after the country announced BTC as legal tender. Furthermore, the Central American country exercised widespread safety-increasing operations, such as mass arrests of criminals and hoodlums, constantly reported day-to-day by president Nayib Bukele, in his tweets.
Bitcoin Valley may be another bold signal to help accelerate global adoption. Yet, we have to keep an eye on negative forces, namely the former admonitory remarks of IMF and BIS, concerning economic instability, and the latter unwelcoming statements of the Central Bank of Honduras in early August.
