According to a Sept. 26 Bloomberg article, the central bank of Venezuela is taking a closer look at whether they have the possibility to store cryptocurrencies.
Venezuela’s central bank is exploring the possibilities of holding Bitcoin and Ether (ETH) in its coffers, according to anonymous sources who reportedly have direct insights into the matter.
The unnamed sources said that the PSDV is looking to transfer Bitcoin and Ether to the Venezuelan central bank and then have the central institution pay its suppliers in cryptocurrencies.
Can the central bank store Bitcoin and Ether?
The state-run oil and gas company, Petroleos de Venezuela SA (PSDV), had requested the central bank look into the matter after the oil producer ran into difficulties receiving payments from international clients due to U.S. sanctions against Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro’s current regime.
Crypto could count toward international reserves
In the hope of overcoming its isolation from the global financial system, the Venezuelan central bank is reportedly studying proposals that would see cryptocurrencies counted toward the country’s international reserves, which currently sit at a 30-year low of $7.9 billion.
Venezuela received its first Bitcoin ATM
Cointelegraph reported in September that after multiple false starts, Venezuela’s first crypto ATM was installed in the city of San Antonio del Táchira. The Latin American firm Panda BTM installed the machine which supports cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash (BCH), and DASH, as well as the official currency of Venezuela and Colombian pesos.
VC Believes Link Could Soar Above $25 And Overtake Ether
A venture capitalist believes that Link could soar above $25 and overtake Ethereum (Ether) as number two cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
Michael Anderson, co-founder of Framework Venture and an early Chainlink (Link) investor, in a Cointelgraph interview, shared his optimism for the project that seeks to decentralize data. He believes that within a month or two, Link could soar above $25:
“Anything over twenty five dollars I think is not unreasonable to assume”.
Adding that he perceives Chainlink’s service as an “insurance policy”:
“I would put it on par with about the size of Ethereum. And I don’t think that that’s an unreasonable approximation because the way I see it, Chainlink is the insurance policy, the security model for providing robust, reliable data feeds for your decentralized bar contract.”
Recently, the vulnerability of the bZx DeFi protocol has demonstrated the importance of having access to resilient data feeds. Another sign of potential growth is that Coinbase has decided to join the DeFi space. That being said, Anderson does not believe that Coinbase poses a viable threat to Chainlink:
“I don’t see there being much competition. I think the blockchain space requires you to have a couple of things and do them really well. One of them is community development. They have proven that they’re able to build the best and the strongest community. The next is being able to partner with major institutions across all industries and obviously they’ve been able to do that. And then the third that they’ve really shown thought leadership in just developing this industry.”
Link has done extremely well since the Black Thursday downturn. In total, it has appreciated more than 100%. However, it is still below its all-time high of $4.72, reached on March 5. Although the project’s future appears to be bright in the long term, it is difficult to believe the coin will appreciate by almost 700% in such a short period of time.
