Ricardo Salinas Pliego Advocates for Broad Bitcoin Adoption
By Adam GoodpastureJun. 29 2021, Published 4:12 p.m. ET
Cryptocurrencies rallied on June 28 after Ricardo Salinas Pliego, the owner of Mexico's Banco Azteca, said that he was urging Mexico to accept Bitcoin. Pliego also encouraged his Twitter followers to buy into it.
Pliego’s campaign comes after other Latin American countries El Salvador and Paraguay recently publicly embraced cryptocurrencies into their economies.
Pliego views Bitcoin as a viable replacement to traditional currencies.
Pliego responded to a tweet by MicroStrategy CEO Michael Saylor in which he added commentary to a video of Pliego. In the video, Pliego explained how his seeing hyper-inflation first-hand formed his attitudes toward investing in Bitcoin.
Pliego also added that he thinks "fiat is a fraud” and explained why he would take the cryptocurrency over any other asset.
“I’ve invested a lot of time studying [bitcoin], and I think it’s an asset that should be part of every investor’s portfolio,” Pliego said in the video. “It’s an asset that has value, international value, that is traded with an enormous liquidity at a global level. And that’s enough for it to be part of every portfolio, period.”
Pliego used the depreciation of the Mexican peso as one of the reasons he's so high on Bitcoin. “FIAT is a fraud, look, I started my career in 1981, the Peso was 20:1 [USD], today we are at 20,000:1.” “And that is in Mexico, but if we look at Venezuela, Argentina, or Zimbabwe, the numbers lose all proportions. The fraud FIAT is inherent to the FIAT system, and we can see it today in the USA.”
When looking at the global attitudes of cryptocurrencies as a viable means of commerce, the countries most at risk of hyperinflation have been more receptive. On the other hand, countries whose economies are more robust, like China and the U.S., have been more skeptical of a mass adoption of digital currencies since they challenge their own FIAT currencies.
Pliego’s net worth is built on a diverse portfolio of corporate acquisitions.
With a net worth of about $15.8 billion, Pliego knows his way around investing in profitable endeavors. Pliego is the founder and chairman of Grupo Salinas, which controls a collection of companies with stakes in retail, banking, and broadcast businesses.
Pliego said that he had about 10 percent of his liquid portfolio invested in Bitcoin last year when it was trading at around $18,000. Since then, Bitcoin has gained about 95 percent. However, it’s still down 45 percent from its peak in April.
After Pliego announced that his bank is working on accepting Bitcoin on June 27, it rallied about 11 percent as of the afternoon on June 29.
