A while ago now, Argentina was promised thousands of Bitcoin ATMs to be installed all over the country by the end of 2019.
It was reported by numerous crypto news outlets in October that the United States based financial provider Odyssey Group was gunning to roll out around 150 Bitcoin ATMs in Argentina by the end of 2018 with plans to distribute by the end of 2019
A general manager at Odyssey, Begona Perez De Solay made some ambitious promises which said that firm intends to have installed a total of 1,600 Bitcoin ATMs by the end of 2019, with plans to grow in other countries in South America in the future.
As reported by The Next Web, whereas this volume of Bitcoin ATMs might not seem like a lot to the untrained eye, this is, in reality, a big step forward for Bitcoin and the cryptocurrency industry. Earlier this year there was only 4,000 Bitcoin ATMs in across the globe so over 1,500 of them in just one country is a huge leap in the right direction. Odyssey’s move alone would have expanded this effort by almost 50 percent.
If you bring Argentina’s growing economic struggle into mind as well as the value of the peso decreasing by the day, Bitcoin was swiftly bandied about as the best possible way to fight inflation in the country. It’s worth noting that in October 2018, the value of the peso had lost over 50 percent in value against the US dollar.
All the signs were suggesting that Odyssey had come in the right place at the right time to fill the void of the lack of crypto enabled ATMs. However, over a month later the firm backtracked it’s promised and began to set its crosshairs on a new launch.
The CEO of the company, Sebastian Ponceliz confessed in an email to hard fork:
“The expected start date of the ATMs in Argentina was postponed.”
Even though the delay isn’t anything new in the world of the blockchain, Odyssey has a rough history of failing to go through on what it promises.
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