The International Monetary Fund (IMF) said on Tuesday that “efforts would continue” to ensure that the total amount of bitcoin
Owned by the government of El Salvador does not change.
In March, El Salvador concluded an agreement with the IMF to receive a loan package of $ 3.5 billion. Some of the conditions of this agreement concerned Bitcoin: for example, cryptocurrency officially lost its status of legal service, which means that traders no longer need to accept the currency on a compulsory basis.
According to the IMF, one of the conditions of the package was the prohibition of “the voluntary accumulation of Bitcoin by the public sector”. In theory, this should mean that the government of Bukele would not be authorized to continue to accumulate Bitcoin if he wanted to continue to comply with the loan program.
However, El Salvador continued to buy more bitcoin in apparent contradiction with the terms of the agreement. On March 4, when the conditions of the agreement were concluded, the Salvadoran government held 6,101.15 Bitcoin in its official portfolio. During the writing, this number increased to 6,189.18 Bitcoin, a sum of approximately 678 million dollars.
“No, that doesn’t stop,” said President Salvadoran Nayib Bukele on X on March 4. “If that did not stop when the world has ostraca and most of the ‘bitcoiners’ abandoned us, it will not stop now, and it will not stop in the future.”
The IMF did not seem to recognize any contradiction or friction in its note. In fact, he said that program performance had been strong and that the main budgetary and reserved targets had been achieved.
“The IMF staff thanks the Salvadoral authorities for the excellent collaboration and constructive discussions,” said the report.
