Uruguay is officially counted as the 11th South American nation to publicly install its first Bitcoin ATM. The ATM is located in the southeast city of the country, Punta del Este, according to Ámbito, and it is built and installed by two national crypto startups, URUBit and inBierto.
URUBit is a virtual currency that was launched in Uruguay and is now available on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC). InBierto, is a crypto investment platform and also a member of the Uruguayan Chamber of Fintech (Cámara Uruguaya de Fintech), a fintech startup accelerator.
Currently the ATM support five currencies for deposit and withdrawal namely BTC, Binance Coin (BNB), Binance USD (BUSD), Ferret Token (FRT), and Urubit.
Because the machines rely on the Binance Smart Chain (BSC) to process transactions, the companies have not yet added Ethereum support to the machines. The fees involved using Ethereum would prevent people from using the machine, according to Varela, which is why BSC connection was chosen instead. The in-house handling and distribution of currencies FRT and URUB is handled by URUBit and inBierto, respectively.
According to inBierto’s CEO, Adolfo Varela, the project was fully financed by the Uruguayan government. Ecuador, Venezuela, Aruba, Saint Kits, and Nevis are some of the South American countries that have installed atleast one crypto ATM. South America already had 79 ATMs installed, before Uruguay ATM, which amounted for 0.2 percent of all the installation of BTC ATM globally.
Bitcoin ATMs are still viewed as a technological milestone in the crypto industry. Since their introduction in 2014, it has been one of the greatest solutions for people to receive digital coins without any problems. Over 20,000 Bitcoin ATMs were reportedly installed worldwide, in 2021, pushing the total number of machines to 34,000 globally.
According to CoinTelegraph ATM Radar, Colombia currently leads the South American market with 31 crypto ATM installations, followed by Brazil and Argentina with 22 and 11 installations, respectively.
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