Venezuela Isn't the Crypto Use Case You Want It to Be

That's why Díaz is teaming up with fellow expat Jorge Farias of Panama-based startup Cryptobuyer to offer a free educational course about bitcoin to Venezuelans, including online programming and in-person classes in Argentina, Venezuela and Panama.

"The main benefit for Venezuela is the knowledge, what to do with bitcoin, how to escape from the power the Venezuelan government has placed there, not only economically but also for information. There is a lot of censorship there."

There are now many Venezuelan expats working on various projects to help their countrymen, including Alejandro Machado, co-founder of a San Francisco-based nonprofit called the Open Money Initiative that aims to create fintech products and tools for Venezuela.

Machado has helped several Venezuelans use exchange platforms like LocalBitcions and AirTM, since the latter is blocked inside Venezuela.

Díaz said expats become more involved with the broader bitcoin ecosystem when they leave Venezuela.

In part, this is due to fear that public association with crypto inside Venezuela could attract attention from corrupt government officials.

Although some local projects like EOS Venezuela have so far managed to provide liquidity to small groups of local users without such conflicts, those use cases are both nuanced and nascent.

GiveCrypto's executive director, Joe Waltman, told CoinDesk that EOS Venezuela provides fiat liquidity to a local merchant while participants use the EOS wallet Bonnum, which does not support bitcoin nor offer users their private keys.

For now, Venezuelan merchants appear to be more interested in using EOS to access fiat than holding crypto itself.

All things considered, there is still a long way to go until crypto is used for its own merits in Venezuela.