• Economy
• El Salvador

San Salvador, Feb 28 (EFE).-

The president of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, said Wednesday on his X account that his country will not sell its alleged bitcoin reserves, despite the recent increase in its value.

“We won’t sell, of course; at the end 1 BTC (bitcoin) = 1 BTC (bitcoin) (this was true when the market price was low and it’s true now),” he wrote in English on the aforementioned social network.

The president argued that “now that the market price of bitcoin is way up, if we were to sell, we would make a profit of over 40% (just from the market purchases), and our main source of BTC (bitcoin) is now our citizenship program.”

Since January 23, when bitcoin fell to US$38,500, the price of the cryptocurrency has increased by 56.97% to over US$60.000 per virtual coin.

El Salvador became the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin as legal tender alongside the US dollar in September 2021. However, 88% of the population did not use this cryptoasset in 2023, according to a survey.

Bukele criticized on Wednesday the media’s alleged silence on bitcoin’s rise in value in recent days.

“When Bitcoin’s market price was low, they wrote literally thousands of articles about our supposed losses,” Bukele complained, adding that “it’s very telling that the authors of those hit pieces, the ‘analyst,’ the ‘experts,’ the ‘journalists,’ are totally silent now.”

In 2022, the Salvadoran government was expected to issue bitcoin bonds, known as Volcano Bonds, for US$1 billion to finance the construction of Bitcoin City in the east of the country, although this financial movement did not take place, nor did the construction of the project.

In November 2022, President Bukele, who made the introduction of bitcoin his main economic bet, although at the moment there is little talk of such a project, said that a daily bitcoin would be bought with state money.

However, the information about these alleged purchases and the more than 200 million invested in the initiative has been placed under secrecy by government institutions, and only what Bukele publishes on the social network X is known.

According to nayibtracker, a website that tracks the number of bitcoins (and their value in dollars) that Bukele owns and has reported as valid, El Salvador would accumulate 2,848 bitcoins acquired with a purchase value of more than US$121 million, an amount that would have reached more than US$170 million with the current increase. EFE

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