Recently, Gemini has come out with the news that it has struck up a partnership with the Colombian government and the country’s largest bank, and that it will allow the residents in the country to trade certain cryptocurrencies, starting from the 14th of December.
The news was initially broken by Gemini’s principal of strategy and corporate development, Cynthia del Pozo Garcia. The venture itself is part of a pilot program by the government of Colombia.
The program in question is an attempt by said government to check and see how its banking sector (and the entirety of the country’s banking system) would deal with digital assets and their management. The experiment will be run with Colombia’s largest private bank, Bancolombia.
Did you know?
Want to get smarter & wealthier with crypto?
Subscribe - We publish new crypto explainer videos every week!
Layer 2 Scaling Solutions Explained With Animations
The above-mentioned fact is notable, and also important for the discussion at hand. This is because of the number of people that Bancolombia serves. In 2020, Bancolombia transacted and served over 17,8 million individuals. This includes persons from Colombia, Guatemala, Panama, and even El Salvador. The latter is notable, granted the country’s latest position on cryptocurrencies.
With such a huge number of individuals accessing the bank in question, the pilot program will surely work to expose a lot of newcomers to the space to the world of crypto.
The current plan is that Gemini will offer Colombians the ability to acquire and trade Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash, Ether, and Litecoin. These are some of the largest cryptocurrencies in the world (by market capitalization), and take up a huge part of the overall crypto market cap, in general.
The acquisition and trading process will be made available via the integration of a specifically-designed Gemini’s platform to the Bancolombia banking interface.
Gemini, in of itself, is one of the more-popular cryptocurrency exchanges in the world. The exchange was founded by Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, and is based in the United States.
Admittedly, though, Gemini wasn’t the only exchange that’s interested in offering its services to Colombian citizens. There were 14 different platforms that participated in the pilot program, and the most-suitable applicants were chosen by the SFC - the Financial Superintendence of Colombia. Together with Gemini, another notable name that was chosen was Binance.
This is especially notable both because Binance is the largest cryptocurrency exchange in the current market, and also due to the fact that the exchange platform does face scrutiny in some different countries around the world, including the US, the UK, South Korea, and a few others.
Worth pointing out that the aforementioned scrutiny revolves around regulatory issues, and KYC & AML policy employment and execution. Binance being chosen as one of the applicants for the Colombian government-sponsored crypto pilot program signals that the exchange in question does meet the standards of the country’s regulatory standards, and is suitable to strike up a partnership with Bancolombia.
