Chileans are the “least interested people in crypto in the Latin American region,” a new survey has found – and over a quarter of the respondents say they have no idea what bitcoin (BTC) is.
In a study conducted by the LatAm-focused PR agency Sherlock Communications, 2,700 people from across the region were surveyed, with a focus on Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Mexico, and Chile.
But while just 74% of Chileans said they “recognized” BTC, that number was as high as 92% in Argentina.
In fact, Argentines appear to be more crypto-savvy than many other countries in the world, with 41% of respondents saying they had heard of the number one altcoin token ethereum (ETH). A further 30% of Argentina-based respondents said they knew litecoin (LTC), too, with 16% also saying they knew what dogecoin (DOGE) was.
By contrast, between 10%-18% of Chileans said they knew about any of these coins.
When it comes to actually making investments in crypto, however, Chileans are far more crypto-cautious than any of their neighbors and near-neighbors.
Just 7% of Colombians said that they had no interest in crypto, with the same figure climbing to 12% in Brazil and a more sizeable 17% of Chileans.
In all five nations, roughly a third of respondents said they wanted their governments to introduce more crypto-related regulations. But Chileans were the most skeptical of the lot when it came to assessing El Salvador’s decision to adopt BTC as legal tender.
Well over half of the Brazilians, Mexicans, and Colombians surveyed said they supported El Salvador’s BTC move, with 48% of Brazilian respondents saying that they wanted Brazil to adopt bitcoin as legal tender as well.
Chile was the outlier in this respect, with only 36% of those surveyed believing El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele had made the right choice.
Over a quarter of those surveyed stated that they did not have enough money to make crypto investments, but almost half claimed that crypto could be a powerful tool in making international money transfers and exchanging fiat currencies.
In summer this year, the Chilean opposition leader Giorgio Jackson, of the Democratic Revolution party, urged the government to officially recognize crypto as an asset class and admitted to owning an unspecified amount of ETH.
Source: Cryptonews
