El Salvador to develop blockchain infrastructure using Algorand

As President Bukele cuts a path towards national Bitcoin and cryptocurrency adoption in El Salvador, a key partnership has been forged with leading Latin crypto firm Koibanx to implement blockchain technologies.

The rollout will take place right across the republic’s services industry, and Koibanx has revealed it will build its systems using Algorand (ALGO) as a layer 1 solution in a continuation of its work to deliver FutureFi.

The partnership emerged amid widespread speculation that Cardano would be chosen, following talks between its founder Charles Hoskinson and Bukele’s brothers about the creation of a national stablecoin – the colon dollar.

However, Algorand came out on top with the team rumoured to have been racing to show they could be the first to bring the colon dollar to fruition.

The Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain developed by a Turing Award-winning cryptographer at MIT in 2019 has already been widely deployed in national infrastructure across Latin America. It has been used for Covid-19 responses, point-of-sale credit issuance systems, and smart contract financing platforms in varying capacities.

Approaching national governments seems to have become a major strategy for ALGO, with the firm commissioned by Brixton city council to tokenise the local ‘Brixton Pound’ – an independent localised currency aiming to encourage people to shop locally – and an even bigger project delivering a tokenised digital currency to the Marshall Islands.

Leo Elduayen, the CEO of Koibanx, was quick to praise the ALGO platform, suggesting that it solved Buterin’s blockchain trilemma.

“El Salvador is paving the way for other countries to make the promise of blockchain a reality,” he said.

“We are honoured to be working with the government to enable Salvadorians to access a global digital economy and the potential for a more prosperous future.

“To make this possible, we needed technology that was robust enough to handle the needs of an entire nation.

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“We found that in Algorand – a proven blockchain that meets our rigorous requirements for speed, security and stability.”

With an infrastructure provider now in place, it would appear that Bitcoin adoption is truly underway in El Salvador.

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