Bitcoin will be adopted as legal tender in three more countries in 2022, predicts Nigel Green, CEO of deVere Group.
His prediction follows a forecast made on Sunday by Nayib Bukele, president of El Salvador who tweeted a series of predictions about bitcoin to his 3,2-million followers, including that “two more countries will adopt it as legal tender”.
He also believes that the cryptocurrency will hit $100 000 this year.
In September , El Salvador made history by becoming the first country in the world to make bitcoin an official currency alongside the US dollar.
Green comments: “I’m confident that the young, maverick President, Nayib Bukele, is correct about other countries adopting Bitcoin as legal tender in 2022. But I would go further still than he did. I believe that it’s likely that three more nations will follow El Salvador’s pioneering, future-focused lead into the digital age.”
He continues: “Low-income countries have long suffered because their currencies are weak and extremely vulnerable to market changes and that triggers rampant inflation. This is why most developing countries become reliant upon major ‘first-world’ currencies, such as the U.S. dollar, to complete transactions.
“However, reliance on another country’s currency also comes with its own set of, often very costly, problems. A stronger US dollar, for example, will weigh on emerging-market economic prospects, since developing countries have taken on so much dollar-denominated debt in the past decades.
“By adopting cryptocurrency as legal tender these countries then immediately have a currency that isn’t influenced by market conditions within their own economy, nor directly from just one other country’s economy,” he adds.
“Bitcoin operates on a global scale and therefore is impacted by wider, global economic changes.”
In addition, he notes, cryptocurrencies could also help “bolster financial inclusion for individuals and businesses” in developing countries as they “can circumnavigate the biases” of traditional banks and other financial services providers.