In regimes with runaway inflation, money ceases to function effectively as a form of deferred payment. A given amount of cash paid in return for work done today may not be worth anything like the same amount of it is not spent until tomorrow. It is no surprise to observe that in recent years in countries that have recent episodes of hyperinflation, citizens have increasingly turned to other currencies, including cryptocurrency, in order to store wealth.

That’s because, in contrast to fiat currency, which a government can print more and more of every day, thereby undermining its value, cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin have a fixed total possible supply. In the case of Bitcoin, there can never be any more than 21 million Bitcoins. This means that the value of a Bitcoin cannot be debased by increasing the number of them in circulation.

It is surely no coincidence that in Venezuela, where the IMF anticipates that price inflation could reach 1,000,000% (that’s not a typo, it really is one million percent) in 2018, cryptocurrency use has been on a dramatic rise.

In Venezuela, Dash, which offers low-cost, near instantaneous, transactions, has now surpassed Bitcoin in terms of adoption. Speaking to Bitcoin Magazine, Jorge Farias, CEO of Cryptobuyer, the first platform to list cryptocurrency against the national currency, the bolivar, Dash now accounts for more transactions on the platform than Bitcoin.

Its use is so widespread, in fact, that there is even now an organization called Dash Venezuela which provides Spanish-speaking support to users. Arguably, this emergent institutionalization of Dash makes it a sort of de facto ‘national’ cryptocurrency for the people of Venezuela.

In Zimbabwe, which suffered a similarly extreme episode of hyperinflation around a decade ago, the Dash-powered money transfer system Kuvacash, has been growing in popularity as a means of making peer-to-peer payments via the cell phone network.

Fiat currency may be the legal tender in countries like Venezuela and Zimbabwe, but that does not mean it is fulfilling the essential function of money. People in these countries cannot rely on their respective governments to provide the monetary stability they need, they have looked to cryptocurrency, which offers them a real choice, and real hope.

Fortunately, in some other developing economies where there is a lack of financial inclusion, the technology underpinning cryptocurrency is being looked at seriously. The United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) has produced several thoughtful reports on the opportunities and risks presented by cryptocurrency in the Caribbean.

The government of Montserrat has even gone so far as to enter into a Memorandum of Understanding with Barbados-based fintech firm Bitt to create a digital payments platform for the country. Montserrat Premier Donaldson Romeo said, “The people of Montserrat will benefit from increased financial inclusion, and a reduction in their need for cash to make payments for goods and services, or as a means of saving.” The platform will be based on Digital Eastern Caribbean Dollars. Naturally, the currency symbol has an ‘X’ in it (DXCD)!