Four Currencies, One Passage: Does the Caribbean Need a Better Way to Pay?

Sail from the Virgin Islands down through the Leewards and Windwards and you’ll clear customs, top up a fuel tank, and split a mooring fee in U.S. Dollars, Euros, British Pounds, and East Caribbean Dollars — sometimes in the same week. Add ATM limits, local bank surcharges, and the 3% foreign-transaction fee most cards quietly charge, and something as simple as paying a dockhand can turn into its own small navigation problem.

It’s the kind of friction that makes “just use crypto” sound appealing the moment someone brings it up at happy hour. Dollar-pegged stablecoins settle in seconds for pennies in fees, don’t care about bank holidays, and don’t ask which currency you’re standing in. On paper, it’s a clean fix for a genuinely annoying problem.

In practice, it’s messier than the pitch. We went looking for boatyards and brokers actually taking crypto at the dock, and mostly found what our own reporting has said before: Denison Yachting, one of the more crypto-forward brokerages in the business, has completed a grand total of five Bitcoin transactions since its first one back in 2016 — real, but still a rounding error, not a trend (see our earlier piece, Buy or Charter a Yacht with Crypto). Meanwhile the region has already placed its own, very different bet on digital money: the Bahamas’ Sand Dollar, a government-issued digital currency and one of the first central bank digital currencies in the world, has been live since 2020 — decentralized crypto’s philosophical opposite, running quietly in the same waters.

So which version of “digital cash” actually has a future on the water — the grassroots, bank-optional kind, or the government-issued kind? And does either one solve the real problem, which is less about ideology and more about a cruiser standing at a fuel dock in Bequia needing exact change in a currency the ATM won’t dispense?

That’s the question we want to spend some time on. Over the next few issues, we’re planning to dig into what’s actually happening rather than what’s being pitched: a look back at Bequia’s much-hyped 2021 promise to become the “world’s first Bitcoin-enabled community,” and what’s really there today; how the Sand Dollar is or isn’t catching on with visiting boaters; and on-the-record conversations with the boatyards, brokers, and marinas actually being asked to take crypto, to find out whether it works at the counter or just in the pitch deck.

If you’ve paid a mechanic, a mooring fee, or a bar tab in crypto anywhere in the islands — or tried to and gotten laughed at — we want to hear about it.

Chris Kennan has written for ALL AT SEA since 2005.