Brazil’s cryptocurrency uptake may not have been helped by the country’s new president Jair Bolsonaro who seems to know absolutely nothing about crypto. But his head of banking clearly does.
“I don’t know. Is it a coin?” Brazil’s new leader recently asked, when Bitcoin was put to him. However, his administration has taken up previous president Michel Miguel Elias Temer’s lead, who, when in office, had proposed a cryptocurrency which could be used by Brazil’s unbanked indigenous population.
Although Temer was officially Brazil’s most unpopular president whose term presided over corruption, his proposed so-dubbed BNDES token seemed like a step in the right direction. On taking up his new office, far right winger President Bolsonara made his views crystal clear:
“We are cutting expenses. We were about to use 40 million Reales to teach natives to use bitcoin.”
That project, brainchild of the National Indian Foundation (Funai) and the Fluminese Federal University, was vetoed by Brazil’s Ministry of Human Rights, Family, and Women in January,
Roberto Campos, the Central Bank of Brazil’s number one has clearly, unlike Bolsorano, spent some time at least investigating cryptocurrencies and their functions, also commenting in a letter to the Brazilian Senate to suggest that this future market could well include blockchain and digital assets at some level:
“One of the contributions I hope to bring to the Central Bank is to prepare the institution for the future market, where technologies advance exponentially, generating more rapid transformations.”
Earlier this month, the President of the Chamber of Deputies of Brazil issued an order to establish a commission that would study cryptocurrency regulation in the country. Last May, the Brazilian Internal Revenue Service put up new tax rules for crypto, which makes it mandatory to report transactions worth over BRL 30,000 (USD 7,600) every month.
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