Ethiopia is presently undergoing an economic crisis. The rising inflation and a dearth of US dollars are severely driving the price of the United States’ official currency in the Ethiopian black markets upwards.
These adverse developments encourage more people to turn to cryptocurrencies. We want to learn about how the world’s countries embrace crypto-assets which we fervently support for their functionalities.
We believe our readers will learn more about cryptocurrencies’ helpfulness with this latest news about Ethiopia.
Consumer prices soared 37 percent on a yearly basis last April in the landlocked country located in the Horn of Africa, mainly due to the surging gasoline and food costs. These prices have carried on increasing as Russia’s armed conflict with Ukraine continues.
Moreover, the civil conflict that erupted in late 2020 in Ethiopia cost this country duty-free access to US markets and donor funding, per the report posted online by Cardano cryptocurrency news aggregator Cardano Feed.
The destructive drought and supply-chain problems the coronavirus pandemic caused contributed to the Ethiopian birr’s strain. The African country’s government has restricted foreign-exchange allocations to the private sector and curtailed spending to fight price pressures.
These measures the Ethiopian government took prompted a growing number of importers to turn to the black market. The Ethiopian birr traded at 82 per 1 US dollar on the black market last Monday, June 6.
This foreign exchange rate demonstrates that the African nation’s currency has been down 26 percent since the beginning of last month.
Nonetheless, the official rate of the Ethiopian currency at the time of writing this news is 51.70 Ethiopian birr per US dollar, which is down 6 percent within a month. The rising inflation and crashing currency have pushed cryptocurrency adoption in Ethiopia.
This nation has not outrightly banned cryptocurrency utilization, similar to many of its African neighbors. The Ethiopian Government has chosen a wait-and-see strategy and has built a working partnership with Cardano.
The latter is a decentralized and open-source public blockchain platform. Cardano has helped the Ethiopian Ministry of Education build a blockchain-based universal student credentialing system.
Additionally, the cryptocurrency company’s Input-Output Global team announced recently on YouTube that it will launch the blockchain project built for the Ethiopian Ministry of Education.
We are pleased to learn about Cardano’s projects and the adoption of cryptocurrencies by Ethiopian consumers. We gathered that the African country’s central bank, the National Bank of Ethiopia or NBE, is against virtual currency utilization.
This government institution maintained that cryptocurrencies should be avoided for they are illegitimate payment forms. Additionally, the NBE said Ethiopian consumers could settle their transactions using only the Ethiopian birr.
Ethiopia’s Addis Ababa-headquartered central bank has maintained that perpetrators of money laundering schemes mainly use cryptocurrencies. We think the Ethiopian government and its central bank should convene.
After all, we believe they should be on the same page. In this manner, the people of Ethiopia will benefit continuously from using cryptocurrencies and welcoming the helpful social projects of virtual currency-related companies like Cardano.
