Contxto – Digital assets will continue to spread in Mexico following a partnership between Dash and cryptocurrency startup, Tauros. The latter will make buying this altcoin available in 11,000 ATMs throughout the country.
When a person wishes to change Mexican pesos for Dash they must find one of Tauros’ partnering bank’s ATMs. They deposit the cash and these funds can be used to buy crypto assets like Bitcoin, Litecoin, and now, Dash.
Related article: Mexico’s Bitso foresees exponential crypto-remittance growth from 2.5 to 20% of total transactions this year
Tauros handles exchange of cryptocurrencies
Friends Salvador Meléndez and David Noriega launched this startup recently in October of 2019 in Mexico.
Besides handling exchanges, the platform they’ve developed allows users to wire funds and monitor the assets’ pricing behavior in real-time.
However, for its founders, there’s room to diversify beyond being crypto-exchanges. Because of Mexico’s fintech law, there’s leeway for the future of blockchain and other innovative solutions. And they intend to act on it.
That’s why Tauros aims to be viewed as (and eventually become) a neobank. Correspondingly, further down the line, it hopes to offer debit cards, loans, and remittance services.
But in the meantime, it’ll have to settle for being the newest kid on Mexico’s crypto-block.
Related article: Burger King teams up with Cryptobuyer to accept cryptocurrencies
Dash for Latin America
Last December, Venezuelan/Panamanian Cryptobuyer partnered up with Burger King in Venezuela to accept payments in six different cryptocurrencies (among which was Dash).
And while perhaps not everyone is buying their Whoppers with the digital asset, the news was sensational enough to generate further interest.
And according to PR rep, one Mark Mason, the number of active Venezuelan user wallets dealing in Dash has grown 562 percent since May.
Clearly, Dash sees Latin America’s potential and zest for cryptos.
So these ATMs may be a big way to enter the Mexican market.
A prime prize considering its rising interest in digital assets for handling remittances.
Update (February 10, 2020)
However, it seems too much dash can make for some strangeness. That is what Contxto came across after first publishing this story when a spokesperson for Tauros got in contact with us. He asked for us to take down the story due to “incorrect information.”
Of this “incorrect information”, the spokesperson only mentioned one explicit “mistake” and that was in the image we had posted. He said that “the photo you published places us in a difficult situation since they [the cards] will not be appearing with MasterCard”.
Of course, this struck us as strange. It had been Tauros’ itself who had sent the image. An image which indeed featured the MasterCard logo and which still inhabits the tauros.io webpage to this day.
Contxto reached out for comment but received no further answer from the Tauro’s spokesperson.
Just goes to show. The world of crypto, often relegated to the outskirts of fintech regulation, is still full of pitfalls and confusion.
(PS: Weirdest of all is the card’s generic persona name: identical to our Editor’s… well, actually, he does have a pretty generic name.)
Related articles: Tech and startups in Mexico!
-ML
