El Salvador relaunches Chivo wallet following public feedback, plans deploying 1,500 Bitcoin ATMs
The first ever country that adopted Bitcoin as a legal tender, El Salvador, has yesterday relaunched its in-house Chivo wallet after addressing the existing challenges of local Bitcoin transfers.
Owing to initial feedbacks, the Chivo wallet has now undergone an AlphaPoint integration, and the updated e-wallet is expected of carrying out instantaneous low-fee Bitcoin transactions and fixing glitches in relation to stability and scalability.
Within the first month of Bitcoin establishment as the legal tender, President Nayib Bukele had announced that Chivo wallet and had onboarded 2.1 million citizens, which had then, by the end of 2021, amassed 75 per cent of the country’s population. However, the mass adoption had been met with nationwide roadblocks and protests due to system issues and missing funds.
As a response to the above, a step towards seeking a permanent solution for El Salvador’s 4 million Bitcoin users, the Bukele government has partnered with a white label infrastructure provider, AlphaPoint, in order to focus heavily on Chivo wallet’s scalability, stability and uptime, and social impact.
As per an official statement, Chivo has intentions of expanding its current consumer-faced use cases to various other day-to-day transactions like simplifying payments of home utilities, taxes and other daily transactions done in Bitcoin.
The statement reads that the project aspires to deploy 1500 Bitcoin ATMs across the country besides improving the Chivo wallet to serve the Salvadoran citizens.
The latest upgrade of AlphaPoint integration is meant to extend support for websites, point-of-sale systems, and the government’s administrative console. Additionally, the update would also work on improving “Lightning integration for nearly instantaneous low-fee Bitcoin transactions via QR and Lightning addresses.”
AlphaPoint’s CEO and co-founder Igor Telyatnikov has said that the country of El Salvador and its President Bukele ”are truly leading globally” with the first major experiment in Bitcoin adoption at a nationwide level, and the company is “honoured” due to its involvement in the process of providing scalable and reliable solutions that are needed for the mass undertaking.
To explore greater use cases for Bitcoin, the government of El Salvador has also been exploring the possibility of Bitcoin loans having lower interest rates.
El Salvador’s Director of Technology and Economy International Affairs, Mónica Taher, had hosted a Facebook Live event for sharing the agenda of providing low-interest Bitcoin loans to small and micro-businesses.
She said that the Bitcoin small loans would provide access to digital money “for the unbanked” while simultaneously assisting them in creating a credit history, the result of which will be strengthening of El Salvador’s economy “by empowering its small businesses.”
