On Colombian-Venezuelan border, there is a new cryptocurrency exchange service that may help refugees who travel across the Simon Bolivar International Bridge. The information comes from Mrs. Aguilar from CoinDesk.
According to press, the service is a point-of-sale one with digital coins that can be used to buy different types of goods. The point-of-sale is actually located in Santander, Colombia, very close to the Venezuelan border.
The service is created by the company Panda Group, which, again according to CoinDesk, created the POS with refugees and their struggles in mind. Â The launch of the service was announced on the company’s Twitter account. Created as a Columbian-Venezuelan joint venture, this is what the company’s website says:
Among our services, we offer the possibility to exchange both Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash as part of direct trading pairs with a series of different crypto assets listed in our platform. This type of trading transactions is also possible in the case of Ethereum and any of the ERC-20 listed in our trading platform
Currently, the POS allows users to convert bitcoin, bitcoin cash and dai (DAI) directly into Colombian Pesos.
The physical location of the service is in a mall named La Parada, where users can purchase bitcoin with quoted prices on the local bitcoin rate in Colombian pesos. Users are charged 10% above the relevant market price and if they decide to sell their bitcoins can do that for 5% more than the market value of the “people’ currency”.
It’s an interesting fact that it is Colombia that actually has the highest rate of crypto investors in South America. The country seems to be very crypto-friendly as more and more businesses are actually accepting bitcoin payments.
The entire crypto exchange service may help refugees in need to have liquidity, i.e. Colombian pesos. The Simon Bolivar International Bridge is also one of the mostly travelled across points by refugees.