Chivo, which claims to be the world’s first national cryptocurrency wallet, is currently operating with AlphaPoint white label infrastructure.
AlphaPoint, which offers fast, scalable financial technology to institutions internationally, is helping El Salvador to provide financial services and access to Bitcoin for almost 4.5 million Salvadorans actively using the wallet.
In September of last year, El Salvador became the first nation to adopt Bitcoin as a legal tender, as the country’s government introduced the Chivo wallet in order to facilitate BTC transactions in the country.
The government of El Salvador deposited $30 in Bitcoin in every El Salvadorans’ Chivo wallet as ‘seed money’ to “propel Bitcoin transactions.” With every Mcdonalds’, Starbucks, Walmart, major airport and government office in the country now accepting Bitcoin with Chivo, the project has “aspirations in the next year to simplify payment of home utilities, taxes, and many other daily transactions in Bitcoin as well.”
Chivo is also in the process of “deploying 1,500 Bitcoin ATMs around the country to more readily serve the Salvadoran population.” By the end of 2021, approximately 75% of the population had downloaded Chivo.
AlphaPoint supports the frontend and backend infrastructure that “powers the wallet and integrates the entire ecosystem including the mobile application, mobile point-of-sale processing, merchant website portal, call-center support software, and administrative console.”
Their build focuses “heavily on wallet stability and uptime, scalability, and social impact, while also integrating user verification services leveraging machine-learning facial recognition and authentication tools.”
AlphaPoint also enhanced the Lightning integration for “nearly instantaneous low-fee Bitcoin transactions via QR and Lightning addresses.”
Chivo is the largest Fintech app in the country and is offering infrastructure to “bring the 70 percent unbanked population of the country into the financial ecosystem.”
The AlphaPoint-powered wallet facilitated more than 2 million transactions last month alone, “with more businesses enabling transactions every day.” The wallet is “free to use for all Salvadorans, with zero commissions.”
Igor Telyatnikov, Co-founder and CEO of AlphaPoint, stated:
“El Salvador and President Bukele are truly leading globally with this first major experiment in Bitcoin adoption at a country-wide level. No one else has attempted to execute a project of this size. We at AlphaPoint are honored to be involved in the process and provide the scalable and reliable solutions needed for this massive undertaking. The Chivo application is currently supporting millions of Salvadorans, many for their first time accessing financial services.”
AlphaPoint was notably the first white-label marketplace provider in the cryptocurrency industry and has been “a trusted solution for large-scale institutional-grade exchange infrastructure for more than eight years.”
It is considered “a foundational member of the industry with focused priorities in scalability, security, and flexibility to serve clients around the world.”
As mentioned in a release, AlphaPoint is a white-label marketplace software company “powering digital asset exchanges worldwide.”
Via its secure, scalable, and customizable digital asset trading platform, AlphaPoint has enabled more than 150 customers in 35 countries “to launch and operate digital asset markets, as well as to digitize assets.”
AlphaPoint and its blockchain technology have “helped startups and institutions discover and execute their blockchain strategies since 2013.”
Of note, is the fact that the International Monetary Fund told El Salvador not to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, a request that has been ignored.