The bill aims to include Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies as legal tender in Mexico and improve banking inclusion for a large part of the country's population.
Indira Kempis, federal senator of the Mexican congress for the state of Nuevo León, has presented a Bill to make Bitcoin legal tender in the country, as it falls within Article 2 of Mexico's monetary law.
This is not the first bill Kempis has submitted. In April 2021, the senator submitted two bills to change the law, although neither of them mentioned Bitcoin or any other cryptocurrency directly.
The Kempis proposal aims to revise Article 2 of the monetary legislation of the country. It establishes “including virtual assets as part of the digital species that can circulate in the national territory; to this end, it establishes that only the Central Bank can be the one to issue a digital currency.”
The provisions of the bill are based on the obstacles that Mexicans face in accessing financial products and education. In fact, Kempis justifies the adoption of Bitcoin in the bill by arguing that about 10% of Mexicans have access to financial products and education. Half of Mexicans do not have access to the country's traditional financial system, which creates a major problem.
For the senator, the fact that 56% of the Mexican population does not have a formal savings account means that there is neither interest nor trust in banking institutions, and that the institutions themselves have no interest in including these people in the financial system.
Kempis also states that the Bitcoin acceptance It is a unique opportunity for nations to address the challenges such as inequality and move towards financial inclusion.
Mexico is also considering the implementation of a CBDC
On the other hand, the Mexican government and the country's Central Bank appear to be planning to take a different path than that proposed by Kempis.
In January, the Central Bank of Mexico announced that it was working on the creation of a “digital peso”, a central bank digital currency (CBDC) of its own, and had plans to put it into circulation by 2024, with the aim of solving the problems of banking inclusiveness in the country.
Meanwhile, Mexico's Finance Secretary Arturo Herrar said last June that the use of cryptocurrencies was not permitted within the country's financial system, and that this is unlikely to change anytime soon.
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