More than 2 million Salvadorans have registered to receive bitcoin

More than 2 million Salvadorans would have downloaded a government digital wallet and registered to receive a bonus in bitcoin, according to figures shared this Monday by the president Here’s to watching.

The president published on his Twitter account a table with different figures that indicate that the so-called “Chivo Wallet” has 2,255,936 “total users”, although a graph indicates that the “registered users” are around 2.5 million.

The president did not detail which of the two figures correspond to the users who received the bitcoin bonus equivalent to $ 30.

Taking into account both figures, the Government has had to disburse between 67.7 and 75 million dollars.

Neither President Bukele, nor any government agency or private company founded with state funds to manage the wallet, has clarified the number of Salvadorans who only downloaded the application to receive the bonus and subsequently stopped using it.

According to the figures shared by Bukele, which span between September 7 and 25, 14,567 transactions are made per day and 199 ATMs are kept active to buy the cryptocurrency or exchange bitcoin for US dollars in cash.

The adoption of bitcoin as legal tender in El Salvador is an “innovative” project, but the wide use of this cryptocurrency “will take years”, according to the president of the Central American Bank for Economic Integration (CABEI), Dante Mossi.

El Salvador became, on August 7, the first country in the world in which bitcoin has legal tender as an exchange currency, along with the US dollar.

The initiative has generated the rejection of the vast majority of the population, according to polls.

“But there is still a long way to go, I think, to become a currency that competes with the currencies, let’s say, more traditional,” added the president of CABEI in statements to EFE.

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