An Argentine lawmaker presented a bill this week to allow employees and those exporting services abroad to be paid in cryptocurrency, Yahoo News reports.
Fast facts
- Congressman José Luis Ramón said that he presented this bill to allow Argentina’s people — whose local currency, the peso, currently suffers from roughly 50% inflation a year — to “strengthen their autonomy and preserve the purchasing power of their remuneration.”
- “This initiative arises from the need to promote greater autonomy and governance of the salary, without this implying a loss of rights or exposure to situations of abuse within the framework of the employment relationship,” Ramón tweeted on Tuesday.
- Since 2019, residents of Argentina have not had access to foreign money-transfer services and exchanges without the approval of the country’s central bank. This meant residents who were paid in foreign currency were forced to use a government-authorized channel to exchange foreign currency into pesos, often at a significantly worse rate than the market rate.
- Latin America has been on the frontier of government embrace of crypto adoption recently. Only last month, El Salvador became the first country in the world to legislate Bitcoin as legal tender. Shortly thereafter, Panamanian opposition leader Gabriel Silva suggested he was looking to follow suit.
- El Salvador has encountered some teething issues with the implementation, however. Confusion surrounded which department was responsible for organizing whether salaries could be paid in Bitcoin, and the World Bank said it would not assist with the rollout of Bitcoin infrastructure throughout the country.