Brazil’s ‘Indigenous Cryptocurrency Project’ Suspended by New President Jair Bolsonaro

In the recent development, the new Brazilian president took to social media to announce that his administration has shut down a project which was going to launch the ‘indigenous cryptocurrency’ of Brazil.

Jair Bolsonaro took office a week ago and criticized the project. The president claimed that the new government will soon open a black box (a reference made to the plane’s flight recorder) on such types of contracts. He referred to all the state-owned projects and contracts which were taken care of by bank BNDES and other similar institutions.

BNDES is a bank associated with Brazil’s Ministry of Development, Industry, and Trade and takes care of the long term projects which are aimed at developing the country.

The Inside Story

Through a tweet,Bolsonaro revealed that his administration has cancelled the project to create a digital currency for Brazil’s indigenous community. The $12 million project was stopped under the claims that the contract was not seemingly assigned through a proper bidding process, but was instead directly signed by the National Indian Foundation (Funai) and the Fluminense Federal University (UFF).

As revealed by Estadao, a local news outlet, the Minister of Human Rights, Family, and Women, Damares Alves, vetoed the cryptocurrency development project.

More on the project

The contract was recently signed on December 28 which was just three days before the mandate of the former president Michel Temer ended. According to the president of Funai, the contract was signed at that date because resources were only made available, through a bill, mid-December. Brought by a “Decentralized Execution Term”, the bill in question was never specified.

The goal of the project was the “study and diagnosis of socioeconomic viability of the creation of an indigenous cryptocurrency; development of the cryptocurrency platform; and implementation of that platform.”

It was indeed a project with potential, all because of the large amount of money involved. The idea was not just to develop a cryptocurrency, but rather also about developing functional mapping and a territorial database.

The proposed cryptocurrency was also regarded as an innovative idea as that would have primarily served as the alternative currency for the indigenous people to facilitate transactions and might have played a key role in transforming their lives.

The future of cryptos in Brazil becomes unstable

Globo reported that the Funai employees revealed that the work assigned was of ‘questionable technical relevance’ and the people who were hired without any technical analysis.

It would be interesting to see how things unfold soon, and we will keep an eye out on future developments. Cryptocurrency is a developing industry in Brazil. Around mid-December last year, the BNDES revealed that they were about to launch the first Brazilian stabecoin, called BNDES TOKEN, aimed at tracking the transfer of public money and at providing better transparency to the bank’s initiatives.

Recently, a cryptocurrency was launched by the Brazilian football club Atletico Mineiro for its fans. In a similar event, a local supermarket chain, Oasis Supermercados had started accepting Bitcoin Cash, Litcoin and Bitcoin payments, thus revealing the imminent mass adoption of cryptocurrency in the country.