But not only was the BTC purchased using public funds, El Salvador’s president tweeted each time he purchased the cryptocurrency.
This week, a Salvadoran legal aid agency known as ALAC El Salvador published a denial from El Salvador’s development bank to reveal the exact amount of the country’s Bitcoin holdings.
According to the refusal shared on Twitter, bank BANDESAL is unable to provide details on its Bitcoin Trust (FIDEBITCOIN) in order to safeguard national interests.
However, the country’s Bitcoin holdings are not really a secret if you know where to look — President Nakib Bukele has seemingly tweeted the exact amount of Bitcoin he has purchased on the date of each purchase. There is even a website dedicated to Bukele’s Bitcoin holdings, NayibTracker, which shows a 54% loss to-date of approximately $58 million. Our coverage of Bukele’s BTC purchases puts the amount at 2,301 BTC as of September 2022.
While there is no guarantee that El Salvador has only purchased the amount of Bitcoin that its president tweeted about, the denial by BANDESAL to reveal exact information has been criticized by the anti-corruption body. ALAC El Salvador tweeted:
“The confidentiality limits the possibility for citizens to access and receive information on the operations carried out with public funds by BANDESAL.”
Regardless of the exact amount of the country’s BTC holdings, the experiment to make Bitcoin into a legal tender in the Central American country has so far met with muted success.
One year after the country’s landmark BTC decision, there is no evidence that crypto is actively being used in the economy. Reports from this fall found that about 86% of businesses have never completed a Bitcoin transaction, while 71% of citizens believed that BTC did nothing to improve their family’s finances. Most importantly, only 2% of the country’s remittances (a large portion of their GDP) were sent in Bitcoin.
