During a press conference yesterday, the President of Venezuela, Nicolas Maduro, said that the national debt “will be settled [with creditors] using cryptocurrencies”.
Some days ago, it was reported that the Venezuelan Central Bank held bitcoin and ethereum and that they were deciding what to do with them. It now turns out that President Maduro has a precise idea in this regard: to use these funds to pay part of the public debt.
In particular, Maduro is trying to settle the country’s debts with China and Russia, and in order to keep up with the deadlines, he is considering offering BTC and ETH as payments.
After all, as Maduro himself has revealed, there are problems in paying creditors because of bans imposed by the USA, which could be circumvented using these cryptocurrencies.
“Venezuela has launched a global renegotiation with all external debts, which has gone quite well. There are difficulties that we have explained to creditors, and the main difficulty is Trump”.
According to the Colombian television channel NTN24, if these negotiations go ahead, Venezuela could use cryptocurrencies to pay off some of its debt in the next few days.
The President also promised to reveal the outcome of the negotiations and therefore probably also when the transactions will be carried out in BTC or ETH.
It is not known whether these negotiations also involve the national state cryptocurrency, the Petro, but it is known that at the beginning of the year Russia refused to accept it as a payment for the debts. It is likely that China’s position in this regard is not very different either.
To be honest, it is not even known what the position of these two creditors is with respect to Maduro’s new proposal, but it is to be expected that payments in bitcoin or ethereum could be more likely to succeed.
