South America: Crypto and Blockchain News Roundup 5th to 11th January 2009

South America

Welcome to our weekly roundup of all important blockchain and cryptocurrency news from around the world. Follow the latest developments in the cryptocurrency space continent by continent, country by country.

Venezuela

Government protests US Petro sanctions: Venezuela has registered a formal complaint to the World Trade Organization against the US sanctions on its cryptocurrency, Petro. The South American country revealed the development of the new cryptocurrency near the end of 2017 and managed to launch it in 2018. But although it has been in use within several different industries, it has seen a stiff resistance from US lawmakers, and more significantly, by President Donald Trump, who passed an executive order to undermine Petro last March.

Given the perpetually nose-diving bolivar and the consequential spectacular economic inflation, Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro sanctioned the use of cryptocurrency to collect taxes from crypto businesses in the country. But the hurdles set by the US mean that any economic relief is highly unlikely. According to Reuters, the US will now have to respond to the complaint to the WTO within 60 days; otherwise, the organization will have to decide on the complaint’s merits.

Brazil

Brazilian analyst says not possible to compare Bitcoin with tulip bubble: Bitcoin is usually contrasted with the Tulip Mania, which was an economic phenomenon during the Dutch Golden Age where tulip buds reached extraordinarily high levels and then dramatically collapsed in 1637. But Samuel Maurer, an analyst at the Bitcoin Banco Group, has dispelled this notion and claims that there is no similarity of the Bitcoin phenomenon with that event.

To justify his claim, the analyst referred to the fact that the cost to price ratio is different from the tulips and this completely differentiates the two phenomena. He also emphasized that cost of Bitcoin production always increases as the value increases, and the market crash in 2018 and the following small recovery in 2019 signifies the health and liquidity of the crypto active market and makes it impossible to be compared with the “tulip fever”.

Brazilian crypto holders seek physical vaults for storing digital assets: As counterintuitive and ironic as it sounds, Brazilian whales and cryptocurrency investors have turned to the good old iron vaults to safeguard their digital cryptocurrency assets. Crypto crimes usually comprise intricate hacking and fancy technologies but recently, there has been a surge in traditional methods of theft like banditry, extortion, and kidnappings.

This means that many Brazilian investors have started to store their wealth in rather elaborate cold storages secured by several armored and reinforced steel doors. The doors can only be accessed using biometrics of authorized persons and palm scanners reading up to 5 million individual points on the hand and the blood pressure through infrared waves.

Chile

Supreme Court validates decision to close crypto exchange’s bank accounts: TheChilean Supreme Court has backed the decision of keeping closed the account of cryptocurrency exchange Orionx with state-owned BancoEstado. The saga began earlier this year, when Chilean banks Itau Corpbanca, Bank of Nova Scotia, and Banco Estado decided to curb the cryptocurrency operations in the country by shutting down accounts of the largest digital assets platforms Crypto MKT, Buda and Orionx. An appeal in the Supreme court was filed by the crypto companies in July, but the latest decision of the apex court supporting the actions of the bank and calling crypto activities “illegal and arbitrary” spells bad news for the future of cryptocurrency in the country.

Argentina

NEM Foundation to develop blockchain-powered copyright system for journalists: NEM Foundation and CISPREN, a local trade union of journalists of the city of Cordoba, have signed a Memorandum of Understanding which will lead to the establishment of a blockchain-powered solution for copyright protection. The memorandum aims to solve problems associated with protection of intellectual property rights, including content theft, plagiarism, and royalty defaults.

The solution will allow authors to upload their content directly to the blockchain, which will create a timestamp as proof of authenticity and will also attach a unique QR code and a digital signature to each piece to serve as a proof of ownership in case of any fraudulent activities.

 

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