The idea of the president of El Salvador to save the Central American country from the crisis by paying salaries to the public administration with bitcoin seems to be working.
At least, that can be glimpsed in the new decision by Natib Bukele, who announced that the country bought 150 more bitcoin, bringing its reserves in the volatile cryptocurrency to more than 700 units.
Each bitcoin, this Monday, September 20, is trading at $ 48,000, so it is just over 33 million in total that El Salvador has accumulated.
“We just bought dip,” Bukele tweeted referring to a drop in bitcoin prices (a week ago it was trading above $ 51,000). And he added that El Salvador holds more than 700 coins.
We just bought the dip.
150 new coins!
El Salvador now holds 700 coins.#Bitcoin🇸🇻
– Nayib Bukele 🇸🇻 (@nayibbukele) September 20, 2021
In early September, El Salvador became the first country to adopt bitcoin as its official currency, along with the US dollar.
The arrival of bitcoin brought some problems, such as the collapse of the Chivo Wallet, the electronic wallet promoted by the local government to collect and pay with cryptocurrencies.
Not everything runs on rails in El Salvador with the new regulations. One cryptocurrency expert defined the “bitcoin law” as a sham in a analysis published in the magazine “Foreign Policy“.
David Gerard, a digital asset finance expert and author of the book Attack of the 50 Foot Blockchain and the cryptocurrency and blockchain blog of the same name, said that creating a payment system that users trust takes a long time.
Gerard also points out in his article that “the Chivo project is led by a group of Venezuelans who are part of a kind of ‘shadow cabinet’ of unofficial advisers who are known to work with the Venezuelan opposition.”
According to Gerard, the leader of these advisers is Sara Hanna, and the promoter of cryptocurrencies is Lorenzo Rey, who designed the Chivo network. “Rey’s payment experience was promoting an alternative cryptocurrency, Dash, as a means of payment and remittances in Venezuela, but many of the Venezuelan merchants listed as accepting Dash could not even be verified as existing,” he publishes The printing press.
The expert warns that he fears that “criminals will bring ‘dirty’ bitcoin to El Salvador and proceed to exchange them for ‘clean’ dollars.
This video is part of the advertising and digital marketing campaign being carried out by the Press Secretariat of El Salvador to teach how to download and use the Chivo Wallet.