“Ask Me Anything” with LocalBitcoins’ Head of Business Development, Vladislav Alimpiev, and Blockchain Summit Latam
LocalBitcoins’ Head of Business Development, Vladislav Alimpiev, sat down recently with Cristóbal Pereira from Blockchain Summit Latam for an “Ask Me Anything” session on Instagram Live. Here are the highlights from that interview.
Cristóbal Pereira: Hi Vladislav, how are you?
Vladislav Alimpiev: Hi Cristóbal, I’m great, thank you. Happy to join here. How are you?
CP: Also great. It’s a pleasure to have you here for Blockchain Summit Latam so that our community can ask questions from you.
VA: The pleasure is mine and it’s exciting to do this for the community. Let’s hope that we have fun and interesting questions.
CP: Ok, let’s start from Venezuela. Recently, Venezuela announced a new currency, “digital bolivar”. How did LocalBitcoins react to this currency change and how can LocalBitcoins’ customers create ads?
V: Yes, Venezuela changed its currency from “sovereign bolivar” to the new “digital bolivar”, removing 6 zeroes from the currency. This is proof of the fact that there is hyperinflation in Venezuela and it’s also a sombre and sad reminder that the people in Venezuela need crypto.
We have reacted swiftly. Of course, once we got the news, our developers got working and ads can be created in VED (the digital bolivar), and the old currency VES is still in use for the people who listed the ads before the change. So, the ad creation in Venezuela is very simple: you can go and create one, just create an ad for VED. The currency change has already been integrated on our platform.
C: Ok, that’s good. How can customers create ads in general? How does the process go? What to take into account?
V: Creating ads is very easy. Step one is signing in to your account straight from the header of the website. Then you post an offer. You can also customize your ad a lot. LocalBitcoins ads are actually very customizable. There are a lot of things that you can change.
The most important thing is to set the price right. The beauty of it is that you can decide your own price. There’s a useful tool formula with which you can set your price with a 2 percent variation of the market rate. The tool will fetch the price and update it accordingly.
Also, always be sure what you’re selecting, what you’re buying, that you choose the correct currency and the country. These are very basic things but also very important.
You can also customize your ads to be visible only when it’s suitable for you. This is called the “Working hours” feature.
And also, if you create a “Sell” ad, you need to obviously have those bitcoins in your LocalBitcoins wallet, otherwise you can’t sell those bitcoins.
C: OK, that’s good information. How about the LocalBitcoins mobile application? Is it already available for the LocalBitcoins community in Latin America?
V: If you’re an Android user, yes, you can go and download it already! If you’re an iPhone user, the review takes a longer time. So, if you have Android, go download the app and trade!
C: Does LocalBitcoins have an affiliate program and how does it work?
V: Yes, we have an affiliate program and it’s super easy to sign up. First you have to sign up for an account, then you enable the affiliate program and you’re ready to use it!
The premise is very easy. You just share your own customizable link, and share it with your friends and network. They trade, and you get paid 20% of the fees LocalBitcoins makes. Now, if you bring both parties of the trade, you would get 40%. But typically it’s 20% of the escrow fee. In any case it’s free money, so bring your friends to LocalBitcoins!
C: OK, how is LocalBitcoins improving the service to protect against scammers?
V: We take scammers very seriously. Scammers will be banned and they will never be able to trade on our platform again.
We have good KYC (Know Your Customer) policies and are always trying to get better. Since our customers are strongly identified, they are less likely to do bad activities.
We have a large, dedicated and fantastic team of investigators constantly checking what’s going on. They do amazing work and are always learning new stuff and staying on top of the latest trends in the industry.
Last but not least, we have secret algorithms in place to catch illicit actors, but I’m not gonna tell you what those algorithms are because then they wouldn’t be a secret!
C: Last time we talked was over one month ago before Blockchain Summit Latam. Back then we didn’t know much about the Bitcoin Law in El Salvador. How do you think the process has started in El Salvador?
V: One of the most important things is that the government has been able to bank more people in a month than it has been able to do in years. This amazing technology that blockchain is has been able to give access to financial systems to Salvadorans that they didn’t previously have.
In my view, El Salvador is one of the best example countries. Their Bitcoin law is an exercise that has never been done before. The whole world is watching how it will succeed.
The reason why the law makes sense in El Salvador is remittances, sending money from one country to another. Crypto is much better when it comes to remittances than traditional ways. If we forget the cost for a while, I’ll give you an example. As a company, we recently had to pay an invoice and we couldn’t pay with crypto, so we had to make a bank transfer and it took 5 days. If you pay with crypto, it will take a maximum of one hour or so, to anywhere in the world. Crypto is so underused when it comes to remittances and international payments.
With this in mind, it’s interesting to see how Salvadorans will use this opportunity and how expats will notice it and how remittances will be sent a decade from now. Maybe we are witnessing the first signs of a catalyst that will build a new financial change in the world.
C: Could El Salvador be the starting point for the rest of Latam? How are you seeing LocalBitcoins in the rest of Latam?
V: Latam remains an important market for us. There’s a growing importance across the board all over Latam, not just in Venezuela.
It’s interesting to see how much movement there is happening across Latin America. It remains to be seen which Latin American country is going to be the next one. Countries don’t have to go the El Salvador way, but sensible regulation is needed so that, for example, merchants could accept cryptocurrencies easier. Crypto adoption is not either 0 or 100, either banned or legal tender. And definitely there are similarities across the board when legislation is concerned.
If I have to make a guess, (and this is my personal opinion, not the company’s), about which country will make Bitcoin legal tender next, I would say the country will be in Central America, maybe Honduras or Panama. And I say Panama because it doesn’t have its own currency. They use the US dollar but they don’t have a say on the US monetary policy. It’s easier to open up to a new monetary policy when you don’t have your own legal tender.
C: Thanks for your comments, Vlad! It was nice to do this interview again. Do you have any final words for the LocalBitcoins community in Latin America?
V: Thank you, Cristóbal. Yes, we are getting more active in our community building efforts in Latin America. We have recently launched Instagram and Twitter in Spanish with the handle LocalBitcoinsES. Also on YouTube you can find videos in Spanish on our channel LocalBitcoinsTV.
Please tell us how we could develop our service even better. We would like to hear from you. Also, if you’re representing a company from Latam, reach out to us. Maybe we would like to work with you!
