This Bitcoin Skeptic Wants to Make 'Stable' Cryptos for Venezuela

Economist Steve Hanke often scoffs that bitcoin isn't "a real currency." The Johns Hopkins University professor has also compared the cryptocurrency market to the Dutch tulip bubble, and even went so far once as to claim crypto exchange hacks prove these assets are "Unstable and unsafe."

Revealed exclusively to CoinDesk, Hanke recently joined the board of advisors for the peer-to-peer cryptocurrency exchange AirTM. He will guide the Mexico City-based startup's expansion in Latin America, including a new system for price-stable assets that Hanke will design himself.

"AirTM dollars will be an ERC20 token that will be backed by dollars in our reserve, with the help of our banking partner Synapsify," Galindo said.

Perhaps more ambitiously, Hanke will design a currency-board style system for issuing price-stable digital currencies through AirTM. According to Hanke, a currency board - a type of monetary authority that prioritizes fixed exchange rates over the other objectives of central banks - guarantees the asset's price remains perfectly stable against the anchor.

It's unclear what Hanke's upcoming AirTM assets will eventually look like, or how they will fit into the AirTM ecosystem, although the economist expects his design will also involve blockchain technology.

In Hanke's mind, the fact that bitcoin was designed so that the overall supply capped at 21 million digital coins inherently guarantees its price will be speculative.

Hanke told CoinDesk he was drawn to AirTM because the company, which he described as a digital clearing house helping Venezuelans swap bolivars for U.S. dollars, has some of the world's best primary data about Venezuelan currency trading.

As of May 2018, the company's records showed 65 percent of AirTM's 4,000 daily users hailed from inflation-riddled Venezuela.

Hanke wanted a way to apply his research and experience to the current crisis in Venezuela.

"If in the future, a president calls Professor Hanke up and says we want to solve hyperinflation, he will know that AirTM has the infrastructure to do that."