Interview-Athena Argentina Head of IT & Innovation Santiago Molins
INTERVIEW: Options For The Cryptocurrency Trade Grow In Argentina, According To Expert
Our experienced Head of IT and Innovation, Santiago Molins, for Athena Argentina was recently interviewed by the Chinese news service XInhua. Here is the link to the Spanish language version:
https://athenabit.co.in/ARGBTC
We bring you the English version via Google Translate:
Spanish.xinhuanet.com 2019–01–09 11:25:53
BUENOS AIRES, Jan. 8 (Xinhua) — Options for the cryptocurrency trade are growing in Argentina despite the global situation of the sector, which registered a fall in 2018 after the boom of previous years.
The South American country, accustomed to the swings of its economy and to the depreciation of the peso, the national currency, observes with interest options linked to virtual currencies, such as bitcoin.
Among other companies, the company Athena Bitcoin, a company with headquarters in the US city of Chicago and seeking to boost its regional expansion, settled in Buenos Aires recently.
The company “began an expansion process in December 2017 in Colombia, where the 17 ATMs have already passed, including Bogotá, Bucaramanga, Cali and Barranquilla.The second country to expand is Argentina, the strategy is to have a foot in the Southern Cone. , a foot in the area closest to the Caribbean and from there start to expand towards the other countries, “Santiago Molíns, head of Technology and Innovation of the company, said in an interview with Xinhua.
Athena “is the first company that formally expands to Latin America, a virgin territory in question of bitcoin ATMs, cryptocurrencies.The ATMs have the particularity that they are the bridge between the physical world and the virtual world. the cashier because he does a job of legitimating technology “, the expert stressed.
According to data from the sector, Argentina is the fourth country in Latin America in terms of the number of bitcoin ATMs, after Colombia, Mexico and Panama.
A more flexible regulation by the Central Bank regarding ATMs has facilitated the installation of units that process virtual currencies, which are currently eight.
Molins explained why the boom in the southern country, stating that
“When you talk about bitcoin with people in the world, they often say ‘ah, that coin of lie’ or ‘toy.’ It is the first prejudice that people have. What happens is that in Argentina, unfortunately, our national currency has been subjected to the same judgment several times. We destroy seven coins in 80 years or so, then the role of money is already questioned and any alternative that is pursued with greater mental openness, precisely because of this,”
he said. In 2018 bitcoin faced a sharp drop, and its price, which reached almost $ 20,000 at the end of 2017, dropped to almost $ 3,000 at the end of last year. Despite this, Buenos Aires is located as an important market for the concentration of this virtual currency throughout the world. Local companies, alert to this phenomenon, have made decisions related to trade based on digital currencies, such as the signature Garbarino Viajes, which since last October became the first in the tourism sector to accept bitcoins as a means of payment. Molins said his experience began in Denmark, where he started managing a network of seven bitcoin ATMs.
“After that one-year experience, I returned to Argentina, and when I saw that there was no round-trip ATM, that is, buying and selling, I decided to set up four ATMs, which were educational prototypes. Bitcoin Chile Association, the Bitcoin Argentina Association and two private places, “ he said.
From that task the expert was summoned by Athena, who, he said, has a proposal that “is quite ‘mainstream’, because it is in places accessible to anyone, before it was something more niche but now is a new stage.”
The firm has placed bitcoin ATMs in galleries, shopping centers and supermarkets, waiting for people to get interested.
“They are distributed in San Fernando, Pilar, Tigre, Avellaneda and La Plata”, explained Molíns, who was enthusiastic about the growth of the sector. “We have less than four months of operations and we have already passed the 1,000 users a while ago, we must be almost in the 2,000 users,” he said.
The public, he said, “is quite varied, we have a percentage of users who use it as a remittance probably, and another who uses it as a sophisticated investment method. When the economic situation becomes adverse here, the dollar rises a lot, we see many new users, one day we see that people are interested, create the user and buy four or five dollars, it’s good, because people are looking for a way to find it back, “said the expert.
The Argentine investment in bitcoin, he said, “accompanies the market a lot, when it is low we see many purchases, and when it is high, we see that there are many sales, which is interesting, because that happens in Argentina and in other places. There are countries with a separate ecosystem. “ End
