El Salvador buys 11 BTC only a day after reaching a deal with IMF
Jesse Coghlan
El Salvador bought $1 million worth of Bitcoin a day after striking a $1.4 billion deal with the International Monetary Fund that stipulated limits on dealing with the cryptocurrency.
The country’s National Bitcoin Office wrote in a Dec. 19 X post that it had “transferred over a million dollars worth of Bitcoin to our Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” with its website showing it had added 11 Bitcoin (BTC) to its holdings.
The move broke its streak of adding “one Bitcoin per day” that President Nayib Bukele announced in November 2022 and brought the country’s holdings to 5,980.77 BTC, worth about $580 million with BTC trading at around $97,000.
National Bitcoin Office Director Stacy Herbert said in a Dec. 19 X post that El Salvador “will continue buying Bitcoin (at possibly an accelerated pace).”
On Dec. 18, Bukele’s government struck a financing agreement with the IMF, which asked the country to wind down some of its Bitcoin dealings to receive $1.4 billion from the global lender over the next 40 months.
The IMF said that as part of the deal, El Salvador’s government-led Bitcoin activity, transactions and purchases would “be confined.”
The country also agreed to make private sector acceptance of Bitcoin voluntary, allow taxes to be paid only in US dollars and unwind government involvement in its Chivo crypto wallet.
A Bitcoin Office spokesperson told Cointelegraph at the time that it “will keep buying one Bitcoin a day (likely even more in the future), and we will not sell any of our current holdings,” adding that “Bitcoin continues to be our main strategy.”
In September 2021, El Salvador was the first country to make Bitcoin a legal tender.
Herbert said Bitcoin will remain legal tender. She added that the government-issued Chivo wallet “will be sold or wound down,” and that she expected private-sector Bitcoin wallets would “continue serving El Salvador.”
The IMF Executive Board still needs to approve the deal with the country, which would mark the end of four years of negotiations strained by Bukele’s Bitcoin policies, which the IMF said put the country at risk.
