The number of Argentine users who bought cryptocurrencies, both to preserve the value of their money or as a form of investment, grew by 300% during 2020, so it is consolidated as a savings option that is expected to continue to grow in the future.
Although alien to the majority of the population until a few months ago, the crypto universe has gained thousands of followers among Argentine savers who saw the possibility of buying cryptocurrencies with cryptocurrencies whose value was traded in foreign currency. “Until 2019, buying cryptocurrencies was a way to invest for people with a lot of money or who were from the tech world. That broke last year, when we saw that more and more people started migrating into the crypto world,” Maximiliano Hinz, Binance.Si’s director of Latin America operations, told Télam Maximiliano Hinz, well, the cryptocurrency universe is plentiful – there are more than 5,000 in circulation – the best known is Bitcoin, the first to appear in 2009 and whose price is defined by supply and demand. Next, the so-called stablecoins or stable currencies (such as DAI, among others) whose quote follows almost one by one at the value of the dollar are located. “Electronic dollars have the same security as a physical dollar, so you can have money in cryptocurrencies that are stable, secure and very difficult to steal as there are many security measures to withdraw the money,” Hinz added.
For Magdiela Rivas, Latin America’s management consultant at Paxful, “the main interest in Argentina is in stable currencies, as they allow to be dollarized digitally without limits”. “This helps people preserve their money from inflation in a way not as volatile as Bitcoin, which is an option chosen by people most familiar with the crypto system,” Rivas said.
In this sense, the calculation they make in the crypto market is that about eight out of ten Argentines who buy cryptocurrencies choose those considered stable and not those that vary in price with supply and demand, such as Bitcoin or others. Although the crypto asset market is anonymous, specialists agree that the number of users grew exponentially in 2020.” From January to today, the number of Argentine users in Binance increased five-fold. But not on all platforms did this happen. If we talk about a market average, you could say that the number of users grew by 300% this year,” Hinz said. In this way, from Paxful they argued that Argentina was the country of the region that registered the most new users in 2020: more than 1,000% in users and 450% in volume operated.
