Blockchain Honduras, the Guatemalan cryptocurrency exchange Coincaex, the Technological University of Honduras, Decentral Academy, and the municipality of Santa Lucia collaborated to launch the program. Thursday, Blockchain Honduras revealed the debut of Bitcoin Valley. In addition to U.S. dollars and Honduran lempiras, Cesar Andino, the proprietor of the Los Robles retail plaza in Santa Lucia where many businesses are located, will take bitcoin. He told La Prensa last week that he is awaiting a point-of-sale (POS) system that will enable him to receive the cryptocurrency, adding: “In Santa Lucia, we will all join in this enterprise… By accepting bitcoin, we will get access to a new market and acquire more clients.”
“We have to globalize. We cannot isolate ourselves from technology, nor can we lag behind when other nations have already adopted it,” he said.
A few days before to the formal debut of Bitcoin Valley, Carlos Leonardo Paguada Velasquez, founder of Blockchain Honduras and spokesman of the Central American Association of Cryptocurrency Users (Acucrip), informed the publication: Approximately sixty firms will begin with the Bitcoin Valley initiative.
He stated that the owners of these enterprises have gotten training on the usage of bitcoin and the underlying technologies from Decentral Academy. Coincaex provides retailers with POS terminals that enable them to accept Bitcoin. Regarding bitcoin’s volatility, Paguada said that Coincaex “assumes all risks.”
For instance, if a family purchases pupusas at a Santa Lucia restaurant and settles with bitcoin, the same sum in lempiras will be debited from the family’s bitcoin wallet. Coincaex will accept BTC and then transfer the money to the eatery in lempiras. Entrepreneurs will not get bitcoin. He stated that they would get lempiras from Coincaex.
Reuters cited Ruben Carbajal Velazquez, a lecturer at the Technological University, as saying: “Santa Lucia’s people will be taught to use and handle cryptocurrencies, applying them in various enterprises in the area and producing crypto-tourism.“