In the last few days of March Chile’s only public bank, Banco del Estado de Chile announced that they would refuse to service accounts of cryptocurrency exchanges such as Buda, Orionx, and Cryptomkt. This decision is now being appealed against by the same three cryptocurrency exchanges.

Banco Estado is a public bank in Chile and is considered the safest bank in Latin America. An announcement by them reflects upon a majority of decision making in Latin America. Their decision on closing cryptocurrency exchange accounts means trouble brewing for cryptocurrency across South America. Two other big banks, Itau Corpbanca and Bank of Nova Scotia have already terminated the accounts of the three cryptocurrency exchanges.

The Bank said in a statement earlier-

“Banco Estado has decided not to interact with companies that issue or generate cryptocurrencies, that provide brokerage and intermediary services with cryptocurrencies, and do not serve as a platform for crypto exchange transactions.”

However, Buda, Orionx, and Cryptomkt are appealing against this decision. One of the lawyers helping the cryptocurrency exchanges in their appeal, Mario Bravo confirmed this by stating, “We are going to sue the TDLC to all the banks that denied or hindered the opening of current accounts to these companies and to those who, having opened them, closed them. Here are the majority of the banks in the square.”

Cryptocurrency exchanges in Latin America are picking up in recent times regarding trading. Buda, for example, facilitates approximately USD 1 million worth of cryptocurrency daily. According to Buda’s co-founder and CEO Guillermo Torrealba, the decision of closing cryptocurrency accounts will end the industry.

“They’re killing an entire industry. It won’t be possible to buy and sell crypto in a safe business in Chile. We’ll have to go back five years and trade in person. It seems very arbitrary,” Torrealba said.

Orionx has a daily volume of $83,000 according to coinmarketcap.com. Orionx is going aggressively against this decision by continuing to offer trades for crypto to crypto pairings.

Twitter, is flooded with hashtags of #ChileQuiereCryptos which means Chile wants Crypto which is vastly tweeted by the Chilean cryptocurrency community.

On April 5th, there were negative sentiments of cryptocurrency by Chile’s Financial Stability Council. Hence these restrictions on cryptocurrency might have been at the request of the Chilean government. If the government of Chile is behind this, they will be pushing for a ban on cryptocurrency trading and Initial Coin Offerings (ICO).

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