In Venezuela, the serious economic crisis is causing a shortage of products in physical stores and long queues at the entrance. One of the solutions Venezuelans are adopting is online shopping, because it is much easier to search and find products.
The co-founder of Dash Maracay and President of the Chamber of Industries for Aragua State, José Manuel Da Silva, argues that there could be a relationship between the offer of virtual shops in Venezuela and the use of Dash as a means of payment.
Indeed, he defines this union as the “magic formula” to solve the economic problems of the country.
One of the main problems is finding the products you are looking for in the Venezuelan shops. This forces people to visit several stores to finally find what they are looking for at an affordable price.
Online searches are much simpler and allow you to look for the same product in dozens and dozens of different stores and compare the different prices.
In addition, e-commerce allows you to make purchases from abroad, and Dash is especially useful for this. Venezuelans that live abroad and want to help their countrymen at home is easy to send them money in a simple and cheap way, or even pay for their purchases online.
According to a rough calculation, it is estimated that over 675,000 families living in Venezuela have at least one relative living abroad who sends remittances to the family at home. Dash not only helps to transfer remittances easily, quickly and cheaply, but it is also better than the Venezuelan Bolivar itself because it does not lose value at the same rate.
In reality, however, the phenomenon is still limited, both because on average only six out of a hundred Venezuelan consumers buy online, and because only 2% pay in cryptocurrencies.
The medium-term objective would be to increase this percentage to 56%.
The founder of Dash Venezuela, Eugenia Alcalá, said that the current conditions of the country would be a perfect opportunity for the use of this cryptocurrency because the purchasing power of citizens has decreased considerably due to hyperinflation and, since there are no short-term solutions on the horizon, it is necessary to find ways to preserve the value of their money.
In addition, the classic tools that allow the use of fiat currencies online have become more complicated for Venezuelans to use due to government controls and mandatory identity verification procedures.
Dash, on the other hand, bypasses these procedures, allowing completely free and anonymous payments. It is therefore not surprising that more than 1,000 Venezuelan entrepreneurs have already chosen this cryptocurrency as a means of payment.