A bank from Argentina is now making cross-border payments using Bitcoin

We’ve finally reached that point in which Bitcoin is used by larger financial institutions. for example, Banco Masventas, from Argentina, revealed this week that they’re enabling their customers to send cross-border payments using Bitcoin.

According to CoinDesk, this is the result of a partnership with Bitex, a Latin America-focused exchange, founded in 2014. The announcements finds the regional bank relying on Bitcoin as a rail in international transaction, this being a great alternative to Swift.

As for Bitex, they’re looking forward to seeing more partnerships like this one, which marks the first time when a domestic bank actually adopts Bitcoin for cross-border payments.

Could this be the start?

Jose Dakak, the main shareholder of Banco Masventas, declared that this is part of a broader drive by the bank to increase its digital, smartphone-based services, but also lower the bank’s overall cost of service.

“One of the actions was to contract Bitex as a strategic partner in the implementation of the Bitex platform for payments and collections operations for our clients abroad,” he said.

For the moment, no real-world transactions are available, as the service was just launched. However, it won’t be long until the world’s biggest cryptocurrency, in terms of market cap, will be used for real customer transactions.

“The customers will ask the bank to do an international payment, and the bank uses Bitex as a provider. For the customer, it’s transparent, they don’t touch, they don’t see the bitcoin. We are a provider for them, and they are not touching Bitcoin,” Jose Dakak revealed.

What coin is next?

Obviously, this is a big step forward for the cryptocurrency, as it once again proves to the big groups of skepticals that it has real applications. Also, it could be just the start, as other cryptocurrencies could start talking with banks.

At the time of the writing, one Bitcoin is being traded at $8,251, while the total market cap is over $140 billion. According to the latest rumors and predictions, the price could seriously go up by the end of the week, automatically dragging up other coins from the top 10.