Latam Insights: Bukele Announces Self-Financed Budget; Salvadoran Coffee Purchase Settled With Bitcoin

Welcome to Latam Insights, a compendium of Latin America’s most relevant crypto and economic news from the past week. In this issue, President Nayib Bukele announces a zero debt budget, a batch of Salvadoran coffee gets purchased using bitcoin, and Lightspark eyes the region’s markets.

Bukele States El Salvador Will Self-Finance 2025 Budget, Won’t Issue Even ‘a Cent’ of Debt

President Nayib Bukele revealed a part of his plan to spur the economy of El Salvador, one of the biggest objectives proposed for his second term. During a speech commemorating the country’s independence, Bukele stated that next year’s budget would be self-financed, featuring zero debt issuance to sustain government operations.

At the event, Bukele declared:

I announce that on September 30th we will present to the Legislative Assembly, for the first time in decades, the first fully financed budget, without the need to issue a single cent of debt for current expenses.

Bukele stated that El Salvador wouldn’t even pay for debt interest by issuing more debt during the period, stressing that all payments would be completed using self-obtained funds.

US Company Settles Salvadoran Coffee Purchase With Bitcoin

Salvadorans are beginning to appreciate bitcoin’s advantages for settling cross-border payments without intermediaries. According to info from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, U.S.-based company Compass Coffee completed the purchase of a batch of Salvadoran coffee using bitcoin at fair prices and sidestepping intermediaries.

This represents an advancement in the use of the currency for commodity settlements, as the Salvadoran Ambassador to the U.S. Milena Mayorga highlighted that the producers received competitive prices without third parties taking a cut from the deal.

Mayorga also pointed out that all companies could use bitcoin for this kind of settlement in El Salvador. Jorge Cruz, a Salvadoran coffee producer, stated that the price reached for this transaction was two to three times higher than the one quoted in U.S. markets.

Lightning Network-Focused Startup Lightspark Sets Its Sights on Latam

Lightspark, one of the largest financial services companies focused on offering products using Bitcoin’s Lightning Network, hopes to expand its services to Latam. The startup specializes in building infrastructure for other companies that want to integrate Lightning Network services, making bitcoin transactions quicker and cheaper for end users.

Lightspark’s use case is tailored to solve the cross-border payments and remittances problem, given that it can offer an alternative to banking transfers that can be slow and costly. Nicolas Cabrera, Lightspark’s VP of product, expects Lightspark’s rails to reach 250 million users in the next year, using the services provided by partners like Coinbase, and Latam’s institutions like Bitso and Nubank.

Cabrera referred to Latam as Lightspark’s most important market, as the region has shown to be open to adopting decentralized finance solutions, as opposed to other parts of the world.

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