Welcome to Latam Insights, a compendium of Latin America’s most relevant crypto and economic news from the past week. In this issue, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele meets with President Milei in Argentina, offering bitcoin advice to the Senate, and Uruguay passes a cryptocurrency law after over two years of discussion.
Latam Insights: Bukele Offers Bitcoin Advice to Argentina, Uruguay Passes Crypto Law
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Bukele and Milei Meet: Zero-Deficit Budgets, Security, and Policy Discussed
The presidents of Argentina and El Salvador, Javier Milei and Nayib Bukele, met on Monday in Buenos Aires to discuss several issues concerning the mutual problems of their countries.
The meeting, attended by members of both cabinets, covered topics such as security, debt issuance, and political matters. According to local sources, Bukele told Milei that when he took office, he had just one deputy in Congress, and incumbents blocked all of his initiatives.
Meanwhile, Milei recommended that Bukele apply the same measures he had implemented in Argentina to achieve a “zero-debt” budget. “It was an excellent meeting, very dynamic. The similarities between the two presidents were discussed,” said attendees of the meeting.
Bukele Advises Argentine Vice President on Bitcoin and Volcano Bonds
Argentine Senators and the executive are very interested in bitcoin. During an official visit to Argentina, El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele met with a group of national senators and the country’s vice president, who touched on the cryptocurrency subject.
While the discussion was private, a video before the meeting shows Argentine Vice President Victoria Villarruel inquiring about the Salvadoran experience in the field of bitcoin, having already several years of approving the cryptocurrency as legal tender.
Villarruel stated:
I personally want to use these short minutes to talk to you about bitcoin, it’s something that interests me a lot.
Furthermore, Villarruel also showed interest in the so-called volcano bonds, which have been on hold for several years. Bukele proposed these bonds as part of the financing scheme of the still-to-be-constructed Bitcoin City, a bitcoin-centric metropolis announced in 2021.
Uruguay Passes Cryptocurrency Law
President Luis Lacalle Pou recently signed the 20.345 Law, a bill regulating bitcoin and cryptocurrency usage in the country. The law puts Uruguay in a privileged spot, offering clarity for companies that want to provide crypto-related services.
The Central Bank of Uruguay will oversee virtual assets service providers (VASPs) and will have to issue permits for this kind of organization to operate. These permits will be issued taking “legality, opportunity, and convenience” into account. Likewise, the Superintendence of Financial Services (SSF) will have to identify exchanges, wallets, and even miners that fall into the VASP category.
The law modifies the current money laundering and terrorism financing control regulation, including virtual assets as the subject of control and supervision for current enforcing organizations. Also, it reforms the securities law to introduce the concept of decentralized securities, which are “issued, stored, transferred and traded electronically through distributed ledger technologies.”
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