Bank in Argentina Becomes the First to Accept Bitcoin as an International Payment Option

Popular banking institution Banco Masventas (BMV) has recently announced in a statement that it has enabled customers to use bitcoin as an international payment option. As the bank revealed, clients can send virtual coins to more than 50 countries using Bitex.

BMV is considered to be the world’s first bank that accepts blockchain-based Bitcoin as an option for performing a payment. Bitex, a Latin American crypto exchange, has contributed a lot to the development of such an option. It allows sending crypto coins within 24 hours, however, with a fee of 3% + VAT.

BMV vs. Ripple

Actually, the working mechanism used by BMV is almost identical to that of Ripple, only with Bitcoin instead of XRP. Nevertheless, it should be pointed out that Bitcoin is more expensive and sluggish to send than XRP, due to its costly fees and slow processes of transfer.

Given low fees and small processing time, Ripple moves a customer transaction as soon as it appeared, while BMV and Bitex are bound to send payments in big batches. To send every transaction powered by bitcoin technology at once is too expensive, as it costs around $1.30 on average.

What is next?

As for the future of these cross-border payments on the cryptocurrency market, the big decision is to be made by top international banks, which are using digital currency as well as fiat currency. The successful combination of these two money systems creates the most beneficial result for clients.

"The customers will ask the bank to do an international payment, and the bank uses Bitex as a provider. For the customer, it's transparent, they don't touch, they don't see the bitcoin. We are a provider for them, and they are not touching bitcoin," said Bitex chief marketing officer Manuel Beaudroit to CoinDesk.