Suriname’s presidential candidate Maya Parbhoe promises to replace the national currency with bitcoin in case of victory

What’s new? Suriname’s presidential candidate Maya Parbhoe, as part of her campaign, has presented a plan to introduce bitcoin into the country’s economy to fight corruption and improve the welfare of citizens. If elected in the 2025 elections, she intends not only to recognize bitcoin as legal tender but also to gradually replace the Surinamese dollar as the national fiat currency.

Cointelegraph interview

What else is known? The adoption of bitcoin is only part of Parbhoe’s larger plan to reform the economy, which also involves eliminating the central bank, lowering taxes, privatizing government services, widespread deregulation, and issuing government bitcoin bonds.

Suriname’s financial infrastructure is currently at a very low level, she said. For example, the Central Bank and commercial banks use Excel spreadsheets to determine exchange rates, and capital markets are simply non-existent, hindering the country’s economic growth.

“We need to build an alternative where we don’t replicate the same issues that created this mess in the first place, but build on top of what Satoshi Nakamoto started and build a new system,” the politician states.

She also sees bitcoin as effective in fighting corruption, which is a major problem in Suriname. Parbhoe herself was directly affected by the issue: her father, businessman Winod Parbhoe, was murdered by a hitman, and the case remains one of the largest corruption-related unsolved cases in the country.

The assassination was probably motivated by information about illicit money flows to the US bank BNY Mellon through Suriname's largest bank, De Surinaamsche Bank, and used to finance the Colombian group FARC-EP, which Winod Parbhoe passed on to the CIA.

Winod Parbhoe was also an unwitting participant in this story, as his fellow gambling associates were laundering drug traffickers’ funds by transferring them through casino and De Surinaamsche Bank accounts to a US company.

The prosecutor’s office investigated, but the seizure of the bank’s assets was overturned on appeal, while $16,4 million was withdrawn from the Parbhoe family’s accounts and they lost all their savings. Maya Parbhoe is convinced that there was bribery of the judge in this case.

She cites the experience of El Salvador, which, under the leadership of Nayib Bukele, was the first country in the world to recognize bitcoin as legal tender and has launched a number of digital asset initiatives, including regular BTC purchases with public funds, geothermal energy mining, and citizenship for crypto investments. This contributes to the creation of a favorable economic environment and, consequently, the fight against corruption and armed crime.

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El Salvadoran authorities have repeatedly noted that the legalization of BTC has boosted the economy and tourist traffic, although the president acknowledged that the asset has not yet become as widespread as expected. In addition, El Salvador has been heavily criticized by the International Monetary Fund for its bitcoin policy.

Nevertheless, Parbhoe argues that replacing the national currency with bitcoin will ensure transparency in the state budget and fight systematic corruption.

She herself is in business and has been involved in cryptocurrencies since 2014. Parbhoe says she was persuaded to go into politics by crypto investor Samson Mow, formerly CEO of Blockstream and now the head of bitcoin accelerator Jan3, who was involved in introducing the asset in El Salvador. She has been promoting the initiative to introduce BTC in Suriname since at least last May.

Parbhoe’s team managed to make some progress when the country’s president, Chan Santokhi, said he wanted to discuss the matter with Paul Mehilal, an advisor, chairman of government digital platform E-gov, and head of IT company Qualogy.

However, the latter directly demanded a bribe from Parbhoe’s team to approve the initiative. Moreover, it was revealed that Mehilal owns a mining farm in Paranam district with a capacity of up to 10 mwT, which is a significant part of the power supply of the entire country.

In May this year, the issue of the state allocating huge amounts of energy to miners was even brought to parliament by National Democratic Party leader Rabin Parmessar, but in the end, the prosecutor’s office refused to investigate.

“Corruption is ruining this country and preventing billions of dollars from investment coming in, hampering development. Satoshi Nakamoto ‘laid the foundation with Bitcoin, for money to be separated from the state.’ If the national economy were based on Bitcoin, the governmental budget would be transparent and traceable, and ‘we would become an open-source government,’” Parbhoe argues.

She also wants to create an incentive program similar to bug-bounty, so that anyone in the world could find corruption in the system and be rewarded for reporting it.

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According to Parbhoe, she has a chance of winning in the upcoming elections through reform. For example, Suriname changed its electoral system in 2023 so that every citizen’s vote carries equal weight.

Under the previous system, candidates in Paramaribo, the largest constituency at the time, needed more than 7000 votes to win a seat in parliament. In contrast, candidates in Coronie, the smallest constituency, needed only 300 votes to be elected.

The old system allowed for electoral fraud and made it difficult for a new political party or a new leader to win an election. The “one man, one vote” system could provide Parbhoe with a path to the presidency.