Western Venezuela-based delivery service Piiddo has expanded service to a second city after adding Dash as a payment option. This effectively means that customers in the area can order food, groceries, clothing, electronics, and more for delivery, and pay in Dash.
Piiddo is a mobile app-based delivery service currently serving the western part of Venezuela. The service offers delivery from a wide variety of businesses, and includes in-app delivery times and charges. Originally based in and servicing the city of Merida, Piiddo announced the addition of Dash as a payment option in early June of this year, and has since expanded to service the city of Barquisimeto as well, also supporting Dash payments, announced at the beginning of July.
Piiddo reportedly exclusively accepts Dash for cryptocurrency payments at time of writing.
The growing Venezuelan crypto economy, prominently featuring Dash
This expansion of crypto payment options in Venezuela is in large part thanks to dedicated local adoption teams. Dash Mall and Parking, the Merida-based team responsible for the Piiddo integration, began by onboarding a local shopping mall to accept Dash payments for parking, solving an acute pain point where traditional payment processors took up to hours to complete parking payments. Since then the project expanded to cover additional malls, and to individual stores within those malls.
Venezuela highlights both the opportunities and challenges of mass crypto adoption
The unique case of Venezuela has served as a source of many lessons regarding the expansion of cryptocurrencies into everyday commerce, serving as a rare opportunity due to hyperinflation of the national currency and severe economic upheaval, resulting in surging demand for cryptocurrencies as evidenced by LocalBitcoins volume of peer-to-peer Bitcoin purchases (with Argentina's similar currency issues showing a similar trading spike). The Venezuelan government famously issued its own crypto token, the Petro (reportedly based on the Dash codebase), which the government now claims is responsible for 15% of payments at fuel pumps in the country.
However, the economic turbulence has posed unique challenges to fueling a country on cryptocurrency payments when basic necessities have become increasingly challenging to procure. In particular, power outages continue to affect the country, which create difficulties when attempting to send purely electronic payments. Dash Text, a local company leveraging SMS text commands to send Dash payments without the necessity of an internet connection, reportedly continued to function during blackouts in the country last year.
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