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The Central American nation of El Salvador currently holds nearly 5,932 Bitcoin (BTC), and sits on over $93 million of unrealized profits.
According to current data provided by El Salvador’s Bitcoin Office, the country currently holds exactly 5,931.77 Bitcoin worth nearly $512 million at the time of writing.
Spotonchain analysis shows that these holdings are currently 22.271% up with an unrealized profit of $93.604 million.
I told you so.
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) November 11, 2024
A criticized bet that’s paying off
El Salvador is famously the world’s first country to adopt Bitcoin as its legal tender back in 2021 and continued to take flak from financial regulators ever since. In October, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) urged El Salvador to strengthen its oversight over Bitcoin transactions in the country.
IMF spokesperson Julie Kozack insisted at the time that El Salvador should limit both its Bitcoin adoption and the public sector’s exposure to it. Since 2021, the nation has mined over 471 Bitcoin by harnessing the geothermal power generated from the Tecapa volcano.
The gains also follow critics raising concern that Bitcoin sees little usage in El Salvador despite its adoption as a legal tender. This summer, the nation’s president Nayib Bukele admitted that “it hasn’t had the adoption we expected,” and said:
“I expected more adoption, definitely, but we always prided ourselves on being a free country, free in every way.”
Bukele, recently announced that its 2025 budget will be debt-free. Not only are the 2025 budget expenses covered without new debt. Bukele further claimed that expenses related to debt accumulated in the past will also be covered:
“El Salvador will no longer spend more than what it produces each year. We won’t even borrow money to pay down interest on the debt that we inherited. We will cover even those payments from our revenue.”
El Salvador’s bonds have also recently rallied after it asked holders of dollar-denominated transactions to tender their notes to restructure its debt.
