South America is alive and well today with the sound of new bitcoin initiatives: Rio de Janeiro taking taxes in bitcoin, Paraguay introducing new enabling legislation, Strike launching in Argentina, and El Salvador pioneering with bitcoin as its legal tender.
Someone had to go first in adopting bitcoin as legal tender and introducing Bitcoin takes a special kind of courage — the kind shown by El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, Strike’s Jack Mallers, and Blockstream’s Samson Mow.
El Salvador’s Volcano Bond Is A World First
Samson Mow, CSO of Blockstream has stepped up as the Chief Architect of El Salvador’s new Volcano Bitcoin Bond, a $1 billion bond designed for El Salvador’s economy to buy bitcoin, build mining infrastructure, and buy mining equipment.
In an exclusive interview with Bitcoin Magazine Mow said:
“History is being made in El Salvador and I don't believe that most people fully understand the implications yet. The President and the Salvadoran people are showing the world a new way forward — one built upon sound money and the Bitcoin ethos.”
“The volcano bond is the most significant advance in bitcoin since bitcoin,” he noted.
El Salvador will issue $1 billion in bonds on Blockstream's Liquid Network, a federated Bitcoin sidechain. The proceedings of the bonds will be split between a $500 million direct allocation in bitcoin and an investment of the same amount in energy and bitcoin mining infrastructure. The bond is designed to attract capital and investors.
El Salvador's finance minister Alejandro Zelaya said in a recent interview[1] that they will:
“Send to Congress about twenty bills covering financial markets and investment in securities to provide a legal foundation for issuing bitcoin bonds. (This is) to provide a legal structure and legal certainty to everyone who buys the bitcoin bond.”
Simon Dixon,
