Bitcoin Forum

DeFi might be all the rage in crypto. But traders in the troubled economies of Argentina and Brazil appear to be turning to Bitcoin as their currencies falter.

While DeFi may have some traders dreaming of complicated lending strategies and governance protocols, in certain parts of the world it’s still Bitcoin that promises a censorship-resistant way to protect against rapidly inflating local currencies.

According to a recent report from analytics firm Arcane Research, Bitcoin has just broken price records in Argentina, Brazil, and Turkey—with growth (in fiat terms) of 169%, 20%, and 5%, respectively, over the last two months.

In truth, however, these stats say much more about the troubled state of these countries’ economies than it does about any growing local interest in crypto. But when it comes to Argentina and Brazil, in particular, a surge in local Bitcoin trading volume suggests crypto could be gaining favor among traders as a hedge over other instruments.
Both Brazil and Argentina were already experiencing financial crises long before the coronavirus pandemic, which has only made things worse.

The financial turmoil brought on by COVID-19 pandemic, which Brazil’s president suggested in May was just a “little flu,” has seen the real (the local Brazilian currency) devalued by more than 30% against the US dollar. Interest rates have also fallen to historical levels of 2% per year, causing the popular strategy of investing in fixed-income instruments to be set aside in favor of funds, stocks... and, it appears, even cryptocurrencies.

The more about this topic is here: https://decrypt.co/38238/bitcoin-trading-soars-argentina-brazil-local-currencies-weaken?amp=1

A hedge against what?  There's a lot of economic turmoil in S. America last I checked, and it doesn't seem like the people there would be turning to bitcoin as a safe-haven asset.  As a currency, perhaps, but from everything I've read about the hyperinflation situation in Venezuela and other countries, the use of bitcoin and altcoins hasn't really caught on.  That does make me a bit curious as to why the price of btc has apparently exploded in Argentina and Brazil.  Are their citizens getting a lot of relief money from the government?

All this talk of Defi got me curious enough to read a little about it, though I can't say I completely understand what it's all about.  Part of me thinks it's getting the hype that ICOs/IEOs got in the past couple of years, which is making me skeptical.  Anyway.  Thanks for posting the article, OP.

I wouldn't blame their president for thinking or saying that it's just little flu which resulted in their currency to be weakened. The majority of the countries in the world that have been hit by the pandemic are drowning in the economy although, some are starting to recover.

There should be encouragement from him and that's why he said that for his constituents. But too bad it ended with too many cases.

Just like the other thread that I've commented on, their currency is also weakening which turned bitcoin to ATH through their fiat currency.

Particularly, it's this thread: BTC has hit ATH against Turkish Lira (https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=5266847.0).

Years back itself there is a strong base for cryptocurrency usage in Brazil. If I'm not wrong it is the first country to have a coffee shop accepting bitcoin. This has been taking place from the past, with the local currency weakening of Zimbabwe onwards people started to move towards cryptocurrency.

Same as that now Argentina and Brazil has joined. In the past economists suggested Zimbabwe government to adopt bitcoin to get out of the financial crisis. By the time it is also a must to know about DEFI, because as a user stated it is getting hyped as the past ICO/IEOs.

It's Argentina not Brazil and the first cafe to start accepting bitcoin was located on Buenos Aires, they call their cafe BitCoffee.

You can read more about this article dated way back 2015 https://www.lanacion.com.ar/tecnologia/buenos-aires-tiene-el-primer-cafe-de-america-latina-que-acepta-bitcoins-nid1792436/

I think we can call that a wave. More like it (the hype) and as I see there are more and more defi projects are being built more like FOMO imo.

Bitcoin trading is really soaring in Argentina and it is not difficult to know why, in the case of Brazil they had at least many years of prosperity but since then they have had problems and the pandemic has hit them particularly hard, but in that case of Argentina their economy has been facing problems during the last decades, just last year the inflation was above 50%, yep you read that right the Argentine peso lost half of its purchasing power in just a year.

And when you add the pandemic and one of the most closed economies of the world it is not really a surprise that their citizens are trying to find any way they can to survive.

I don't see this particularly reflected in Localbitcoins volumes as one would expect, so I'm going to remain skeptical about this:

https://i.imgur.com/BYjnJRB.png

https://i.imgur.com/HZkRRRz.png

This is such a common Bitcoiner narrative (that currencies are failing and causing people to buy BTC) that I've come to expect extreme exaggerations on this front.

Yes generally these are click bait articles. Usually there is some large spread but the volume is so small that it doesn't make much difference. This is nothing like that Kimchi premium that we had back in the 2017 days.

We don't know what exactly is happening in the Brazilian or the Argentina market, what happened with Korea is something different. 2017 kimchi premium scenario can't be related with the localbitcoins volume. There it was the local exchange which has the price difference of upto 50% from the western exchanges.

This all happened out of demand, which is the reflection of greed. Here it is all about the money devaluation making the people to move towards a safe haven.

We don't know whether Localbitcoins is the people's choice in making exchanges there but even if Localbitcoins is the most popular option it will probably still not reflect significantly on the charts. We can be certain that not even 30% of the mentioned countries' population are into Bitcoin.


That equation of fiat value falling is equal to people shifting to Bitcoin is even an exaggeration in itself already.

no it is not. the DeFi hype is 10 times less than the last same scheme and is the follow up to the same original scheme of raising free money for doing nothing called ICO. and each new one fails worse than the last.

that is not growth, that is staying the same.
when fiat value tanks, it is obvious that price of everything goes up against fiat. and that is what happened here. if you convert bitcoin bought with Turkish fiat to USD you still get the same 11 thousand something dollars no matter how much more Lira you paid.

We have seen a lot of countries in the recent years like Venezuela or even Cyprus early when bitcoin started where having bitcoin would mean that you would be richer than rest of the public. Recently we have seen Brazil, Argentina and there is a topic about bitcoin price breaking the ATH levels in Turkey as well because their fiat is losing value as well.

So, I would say that bitcoin is not something you should check out with just dollars, that is for people who spend dollars, you could also be someone who lives in a country that has a fiat aside from dollars and you could totally make a profit with your own fiat, and while keeping your purchasing power around the same or maybe even increase it a bit, everyone else will be losing the value of their money.

The pump press again with their stupid clickbait titles
So, in BTC volme the numbers for the lastweeks for those countries are:

Argentina: 97,89,87
Brazil        49,45,45
Turkey       8,7,5

The volume in Turkey has soared to an incalculable amount of 5BTC per week, less than 10 000$ a day!!!


No, you're not wrong, you're totally wrong! The the first coffee shop in Latin America that accepted bitcoin was in Argentina and it was 3 years late to the party compared to the US and Europe.

Just like the situation before on Venezuela and Greece, they claimed that people are starting to buy bitcoin and yet the volume is not that convincing.

Well, the whole economy is struggling not just on the said country so we can really say that they started to learn how bitcoin works but the effect of that is not instant so let’s wait for further trend. The falling country should not be the sole reason of mass adoption, it must be organic.

It also makes sense for a low level country citizen to keep his money at bitcoin because to be honest there is a bonus profit from it for yourself.

You do not buy stuff with dollars there, go to any third world country and you will realize that things are cheaper there, you can stay in a 5 star hotel for 20-30 dollars a night, whereas in USA for example that is a side of the road motel at best for you, 5 star proper holiday inn style is at least 100 bucks if you are out of season and standard room, could be as high as 5000 dollars for you. That is why I think it is quite great for a Brazilian for example to buy bitcoin, because it values up in dollars but also dollar values up against their fiat, so they profit with a bit of bonus as well and get even richer than an american would.

As far as I know, the citizens of Argentina and Brazil have practically no opportunity to save their savings, since their national currency depreciates very quickly. The only correct decision is to invest in other currencies. I believe that cryptocurrency assets in any case for these countries is the best way to save money, compared to the dollar. In addition, given not only political but also economic realities in Latin America in general, not only in Brazil and Argentina, but also in other countries, the number of clients of the cryptocurrency market is increasing.

I am from third world country and you simply explain the harsh reality. Yes things are cheaper here and it based on the area's community standard where people are not much rich as we often see it on Western and Eastern world. It can be a great deal of third world countries also.

Their president don't want their people to panic but it's a bad strategy the people ended up relaxed and majority did not follow the health experts guidelines of social distancing and wearing mask and besides Brazil is a mega city the city is heavily congested because there are so many slum areas there, people would rather stay outside than at home.

There's literally a small chance that these countries would still see bitcoin as the better option to use their money at this given time, especially since those two countries are the ones badly hit by the pandemic on that part of the globe. Not sure whether these data are padded or modified, but it's just unusual and really improbable that they would think of hedging or saving the value of what they have rather than their lives at this point. Perhaps the price in itself soared due to the currency being weaker and weaker by the day, but trading volume remains low IMO--and in reality.

Saw a few interviews in Argentina and it seems it is less about the locals buying or sending bitcoin, but people abroad sending them back bitcoin. It's surprisingly similar to southeast asian workers abroad. We used to send home dollars, but euros are a favourite now and apparently, so is bitcoin, at least because it is actually easier to liquidate with local traders!

This is the point. I am from Southeast Asia where Bitcoin BTC not approved legally but people are involved with it. The only system exists here is people send dollars from abroad and the native people pay them via bank. Then native people are trying to connect with crypto currency, trade etc.

Every seller has a buyer. If people can receive BTC from abroad and easily turn around and sell it, that indicates pretty robust buy side demand. ;)

Not that I want to exaggerate the size of the market too much. I am always skeptical of these clickbait headlines. Volume has increased at least marginally, certainly when you consider Paxful volumes in addition to Localbitcoins, but it's nothing that impressive.

Yeah, and with the entire Southeast Asia now really embracing p2p, and mostly unafraid to do LBC -- I now see that even foreigners are setting up local bank accounts. Some of the biggest ones have trading accounts in almost every country I can see, a relaxed attitude from the governments certainly help.


Oh absolutely. Though everything is relative. The volumes may look small on a global scale, because they're in USD, but bear in mind that even in Malaysia (second behind Singapore in terms of minimum wage), $200 is more than minimum wage, so the volumes show Bitcoin is really in significant demand here. Take into account a LOT of the trades also happen off books -- Telegram, whatsapp and Wechat, it's also what my preferred traders do after a while for pure P2P  -- and it's no joke at least in the urban areas.

What is going to happen when all the worlds economies goes worse and worse? I mean we are seeing it right now, even the best economies in the world are still the best in the position and ranking yet they are not as best as 40 years ago, after the second world war countries who recovered did it very well and they grew bigger and they got big but right now in the past 20 years it got lower and lower.

You can check the numbers and see it doing better but do not let it fool you, that is doing better for the companies and not the workers of those companies, we earn less and we spend more just to live a worse life than our parents did. I think if crypto gets attention in places like Brazil and Argentina who is doing bad right now, it means crypto will do better in every nation one day.

If this is true it's a big proof that investors are indeed switching to Cryptocurrency as a haven for their investment, because right now in this pandemic, Cryptocurrency is the fastest investment that recovers, in just two months it's back on it's feet and now moving to another all time high, something that is not happening to other investment.

Not just with local traders, but there are local exchanges that can you can easily cash out your bitcoins coming from abroad to local fiat without any aid of any banks. Although I would say that dollars is still the king of remittances in some asian countries, but with the adoption of bitcoin in full swing, I will not be surprised if the tide changes and people sending money to their love ones will used BTC. Billions upon billions will flow.

Where's your country? Fees will always be high and based on predicted inflation, that's the problem. And yeah, that's the whole point of BTC as a p2p money.


Ah I didn't know that. The same news I'm reading says that the government has been restricting the moneychangers from giving out US dollars, so I imagined the same would have been happening for local exchanges. How do they control the outflow, it must be heavy demand from people selling BTC there then?

In my country the trading fee is not too much, it is in fact quite contrary cheaper than most other big exchanges like binance and kucoin or so, they are quite cheap but it is only for fiat to crypto changing, not crypto to crypto which is why I only use it when I want to cash out my crypto into fiat and want it on my bank account.

However what is very very expensive is the withdrawal fee, I had to spend some bitcoin for a game and I had to pay 17 dollars for it, the whole thing was 40 dollars anyway and I ended up paying 57 dollars for a 40 dollar thing, you would think something so high tech would make it somehow under 1 dollar but it was super expensive. In any case I hope that bitcoin transaction fee's drop but local exchanges are very vital for most of us who want to get in and out without using American banks.

The increased in traded volume for both Brazil and Argentina suggests that there os really interest going on in both countries where both of their currencies are failing them. Unlike Turkey where Bitcoin also has reached its ATH with the Turkish Lira yet there was really no interest happening in Bitcoin. Both South American countries just show that some of their citizens are already preparing to bail out of their own fiat currencies for their own safety. I just wish this won't worsen as from what I know countries with high inflation such as Venezuela even though they used other currency now shows that these other chrrencies are still affected by the inflation.

Yeah, but NO!
As usual some numbers, we're taken out of context and everybody starts clapping how those people are getting into bitcoins by the millions.

The volume for Argentina (https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/ARS) dropped in pesos to half, and in BTC from a max of 100BTC a week to 50.
Same for Brazil (https://coin.dance/volume/localbitcoins/BRL), a drop from 2.7 to 1.9 mil real.

It's not a flow of money at an increasing rate because people are switching to BTC it was just the usual volume pump triggered by the price increase.


Probably because other investments are not at 50% of their ATH value? Or that they haven't crashed to 20% of that?