US Freezes Venezuelan Government’s Assets and Bitcoin Peer to Peer Transactions Go Up

The tension between the government of the U. S. and Venezuela has recently skyrocketed. In a move against the Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro, the U. S. administration decided to freeze all possible Venezuelan assets. This sparked a new all-time high of Bitcoin use in the Latin American country.

According to the Associated Press, the actions of the U. S. resemble actions that the country took against Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Syria, all of which were considered political enemies. The crisis in Venezuela is already pretty severe, so these new sanctions are certain to aggravate even more the current problems.

Executive orders also forbid any citizen of the country to engage in economic activity with the Venezuelan government or its supporters. However, some sector are excluded. People are still able to send aid to the country and many transactions related to the private sector of the country are still allowed, too.

During The Crisis, Use Bitcoin

The volume of BTC trading on LocalBitcoins, a popular BTC P2P site, is growing up a lot recently. Tensions are higher than ever before and the crisis continues to damage the country’s economy, as the hyperinflation has risen to over 10,000,000% recently.

Before around a year ago, according to data from LocalBitcoins, Venezuelans were almost not using BTC, however, the use of the tokens went up over a hundred times since then.

After the start of the crisis, Venezuela tried to create its own token, the Petro, but all reports indicate that the state-backed currency failed to get proper adoption.