Key Takeaways
- In Santa Lucia, Bitcoin Valley, the first bitcoin city in Honduras, has officially opened.
- The local businesses will take bitcoin as payment
In Santa Lucia, Bitcoin Valley, the first bitcoin city in Honduras, has officially opened. The local businesses will take bitcoin as payment. We will all take part in this endeavor in Santa Lucia. According to a community business owner, accepting bitcoin will expand our consumer base and give us access to new markets.
Related: Bitcoin miner capitulation due to end amid 1st difficulty increase since June
The Inaugural Bitcoin City in Honduras: Bitcoin Valley
In the remote Honduran tourist town of Santa Lucia, which is 20 minutes from Tegucigalpa, the country's capital, Bitcoin Valley has opened as the country's first bitcoin metropolis. Blockchain Honduras, Coincaex, the Technological University of Honduras, Decentral Academy, and the city of Santa Lucia all worked together to establish the project. Blockchain Honduras announced the opening of Bitcoin Valley on Thursday.
In addition to US dollars and Honduran lempiras, bitcoin will be accepted in the Los Robles shopping center in Santa Lucia, owned by Cesar Andino. He said to La Prensa last week that he was awaiting a point-of-sale (POS) machine that would enable him to accept cryptocurrency, adding:
In Santa Lucia, we are all going to participate in this project … Accepting bitcoin will open us to another market and win more customers.
Buy and Sell Crypto fast with just one click!
"We must become global. But, the speaker continued, we cannot exclude ourselves from technology and fall behind when other nations have adopted it. A few days before the formal opening of Bitcoin Valley, Carlos Leonardo Paguada Velasquez, the creator of Blockchain Honduras and a representative of the Central American Association of Cryptocurrency Users (Acucrip), spoke to the media.
The Bitcoin Valley project will launch with about 60 enterprises. He mentioned that Decentral Academy had trained these companies' owners to use bitcoin and its underlying technology. To enable businesses to accept Bitcoin, Coincaex offers POS equipment to them. Paguada stated that Coincaex "assumes all risks" concerning the volatility of bitcoin.
He said that, for instance, if a family purchases pupusas in a Santa Lucia restaurant and pays with bitcoin, the corresponding amount in lempiras will be taken out of the family's bitcoin wallet. After receiving BTC, Coincaex will send the restaurant's lempira payment. Owners of businesses won't get bitcoin. Instead, Coincaex will provide them lempiras, he clarified.
Reuters quoted Technological University professor Ruben Carbajal Velazquez: "The people of Santa Lucia will be educated to use and handle cryptocurrency, integrating them in various companies in the region and producing crypto-tourism." Let's know what you think about this in the comment section below.
