Mexican billionaire Ricardo Salinas Pliego said on Sunday (June 27) that Banco Azteca, the bank which he founded in October 2002, plans to accept Bitcoin.

Ricardo Benjamín Salinas Pliego is the founder and chairman of Mexican conglomerate Grupo Salinas. He is currently the third richest person in Mexico.

On 17 November 2020, Salinas recommended the book “The Bitcoin Standard” by Saifedean Ammous to his over 800K followers on Twitter, and said that this was the best and most important book for understanding Bitcoin. More interestingly, he revealed that 10% of his liquid assets are invested in Bitcoin.

In December 2020, during an interview with Cointelegraph’s Giovanni Pigni, he talked about Bitcoin. The interview started with Salinas telling the story of how he first heard about Bitcoin:

“I was invited to a conference in New York’s city… And there were different sessions, and [at] one of the sessions, this guy from Grayscale showed up. And he gave us the whole talk about Bitcoin and how it’s going to take over…. It immediately attracted my attention. I said ‘well, let’s try it out and see what happens’. I put in a small amount. It was trading at $200 per bitcoin. It was 2013, but at that time…

“What I liked about Grayscale was they simplified it — basically you put your money in the trust, then this trust would do the investment, they would take care of the whole thing, they would take care of the custody, they sent you a monthly statement, and that was a very good arrangement, and eventually that that trust turned into GBTC, which is now an exchange-traded product…

Although Bitcoin initially grabbed Salinas’s attention as a “payment vehicle,” he later realized that “it’s the store value that really makes it valuable.”

Later in the interview, Salinas said that he sold all of his BTC holdings in January 2017 (when BTC was trading around $17,000):

“I had a big party, [was] very happy with my best investment ever, but you know, we always return to the scene of the crime, right? So when it went down to $10,000, I thought ‘well, now, it’s more reasonable’, and I bought some at that time. and then it went down more to $6,000, bought about some more, and that’s where I am, where our average right now is around $9,000, and I’m not done. I’m not selling it. I think I’m gonna sit around for another five or ten years.“

According to Grupo Salinas, Mexico City-headquartered Banco Azteca is a bank that operates in Mexico, Panama, Guatemala, Honduras, Peru, and El Salvador. Its parent company is Grupo Elektra, which is a subsidiary of Grupo Salinas. It is “one of the largest banks in Mexico, with more than 16 million savings accounts and more than 18 million credit accounts”.

Earlier today, in a reply to a tweet by MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor, Salinas revealed that his bank intends to become the first bank in Mexico to accept Bitcoin:

In another reply to Saylor, he said that Bitcoin is better than gold:

And finally, a short time ago, he tweeted again about Bitcoin, this time saying that Bitcoin is “a good way to diversify your investment portfolio” and he believes that “any investor should start studying about cryptocurrencies and their future” in order to fight inflation.

DISCLAIMER

The views and opinions expressed by the author, or any people mentioned in this article, are for informational purposes only, and they do not constitute financial, investment, or other advice. Investing in or trading cryptoassets comes with a risk of financial loss.

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