Despite the stability of the Colombian peso last year against the dollar, which traded between 0.00032 and 0.00034 for most of 2016, the popularity of alternative financial assets such as bitcoin has continued to climb among tech-savvy Colombian citizens throughout 2016, and into the first month of 2017.
Last week, trading volumes on P2P digital currency marketplace LocalBitcoins hit an all-time high in Colombia, according to data compiled by Coin.dance. A total of 366,874,426 Colombian pesos worth of bitcoin trades took place in Colombia! At current exchange rates, this figure amounts to $124,737.
While this figure may not seem overly impressive compared to turnover in traditional currency markets, it is an impressive amount when compared against trading volumes in Colombia from January of 2016, when 163,446,631 pesos worth of bitcoin trades took place during the entire month on LocalBitcoins!!
In the last week of January, 2017, a new all time high was also recorded in the amount of actual bitcoin changing hands on LocalBitcoins in Colombia: 139 BTC for the week ending on 2017-01-28; 485 BTC for the entire month of January. These figures dwarf weekly readings observed throughout 2015, when weekly volumes would rarely exceed 50 BTC.
Colombia is one of the few countries where bitcoin trading has grown while the national currency has been relatively stable. Bitcoin volumes have also risen dramatically in neighboring Venezuela as the bolivar entered a hyper-inflationary collapse in the second half of 2016.
