Venezuela Wants to get into DeFi with Ethereum-powered Stock Exchange

Tim Alper
Last updated: | 1 min read

Not content with its plans to use bitcoin (BTC), altcoins and its own state-issued petro (PTR) coin in international trade deals, the Nicolás Maduro-fronted government of Venezuela now appears ready to take the plunge into the world of DeFi. Well, sort of.

Source: iStock/pawel.gaul

The Venezuelan National Superintendency of Securities (known locally as SUNAVAL), the state securities regulator, has announced the launch of a pilot for the Decentralized Stock Exchange of Venezuela, which call itself the “world’s first decentralized stock exchange,” per its official website.

The chief architect of the platform is Manuel Aaron Fajardo García, who also helped the Maduro regime launch the INTERBANEX foreign exchange trading platform last year.

In a video streamed on his Instagram account, Fajardo García claimed that that the new platform had been in the pipelines “for months,” but that its operators had decided to keep the project a secret until the pilot was ready for rollout.

Criptonoticias reported that the pilot will run for 90 days, and is a “DeFi project that operates on the Ethereum blockchain network.”

Per the government’s official legislative bulletin, the Decentralized Stock Exchange of Venezuela will allow traders to access primary, secondary and derivatives markets for both options and futures. And that’s not all. It will also reportedly allow parties to carry out public offerings for securities, negotiations, transfer, custody and settlement processes.

The bulletin specifies that the platform, accessible via an Android app, allows “security custody processes to be individual, shielded and public, within a trading system that is available 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”

Its authors claim that “the platform guarantees transparency, security, speed, reliability, traceability and a lower cost of operations.”
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