“Now that we’re seeing inflation rising around the world, we’re seeing more and more people looking to cryptocurrencies, like bitcoin, to hedge against inflation,” said Maximiliano Hinz, who heads Binance in America. Latin, during an interview in Lima.
Hinz cited the example of Argentina, where annual inflation is 90%. The country has become one of the company’s top markets, he said, along with Brazil and Mexico.
Argentina has seen its citizens invest their life savings in bitcoin this year, despite the cryptocurrency’s falling prices.
While El Salvador has made headlines for adopting bitcoin as legal currency, Hinz said other Latin American countries have yet to enact meaningful cryptocurrency laws, though he doesn’t necessarily see that as a bad thing for the company.
“The regulation is a framework, but it is not always bad that something is not regulated,” he said. “If something is not forbidden, then it is legal”.
Under President Nayib Bukele, El Salvador bet big on bitcoin, making it legal and buying more than $100 million of the cryptocurrency, which lost about 50% of its value in the recent cryptocurrency crash this year.
