'The new Marulas Public Market in Valenzuela City is the first-of-its-kind DigiPalengke initiative in Northern Metro Manila where an entire marketplace is equipped to accept mobile cashless payments.'
https://pia.gov.ph/news/articles/1015376--
This is quite interesting since even a public market where most of the time common folk buy their everyday needs is accepting digital payments. While this is not entirely related to cryptocurrency, it's as if the people are slowly seeing the convenience and security cashless payments offer to their everyday lives. For years, scan-to-pay stores are just confined within the walls of malls and luxurious places but it seems that we're slowly bringing it to the masses and eventually, it will be the norm to pay only with our smartphones and pre-loaded accounts--and in the future, possibly even cryptocurrencies.
I am not particularly surprised about this news. The entire country of Philippines is already having a mass adoption of cryptocurrency especially bitcoin. So, digital payment is already popular in that country.
One thing I would love to see Philippines though is to become a leader in Blockchain technology and not just to adopt crypto. If you look at the crypto summit along southeast asia, I don't see anyone from the Philippines representing them, I see a lot from Singapore and even Thailand but why we don't have someone from the Philippines you have embraced crypto so much more than any other country in Asia.
The Philippines is also a tech hub, lot of good developers around so I really don't understand why they still lack the good exposure. Anyways, yes let's hope that the country would really move forward to the next 5-10 years and adopt crypto and even cashless society.