Venezuela will refuse Visa and MasterCard in favor of its own payment system

Venezuelan authorities have ordered the termination of operations with payment systems Visa and MasterCard because of sanctions from the United States. This is stated in a joint statement by the Central Bank of the country and the Department for Supervision of the Banking Sector under the Ministry of Economy and Finance, signed on May 16.

It is expected that operations using Visa and MasterCard debit cards will be stopped from November 30, 2019, and on credit cards from January 30, 2020.

In addition, within two months, the Venezuelan financial sector was tasked with developing and implementing a “sovereign” payment system using biometric identification.

We should note that due to the economic crisis, Venezuelans are abandoning the bolivar and massively switching to bitcoin calculations. In particular, the graph of the dynamics of trading volume on the p2p-platform LocalBitcoins shows the growth in demand for the first cryptocurrency:

Data: CoinDance , LocalBitcoins

Earlier in May, Venezuelan authorities reported that the country was experiencing difficulties with payments in the local cryptocurrency El Petro and was discussing the transition to rubles.

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