RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – More than 2 million Salvadorans have downloaded a government digital wallet and registered to receive a bitcoin bonus, according to figures shared Monday (27) by President Nayib Bukele.
The president published on his Twitter account a table with different figures that show that the so-called “Chivo Wallet” has 2,255,936 “total users”. However, a graph shows that “registered users” are around 2.5 million.
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The President did not detail which of the two figures corresponds to the users who received the bitcoin bonus equivalent to 30 dollars.
Taking into account both figures, the government has had to disburse between 67.7 and 75 million US dollars.
Neither President Bukele, nor any government or private company funded with state funds to manage the wallet, has clarified the number of Salvadorans who only downloaded the application to receive the bonus and then stopped using it.
According to the figures shared by Bukele, which cover between September 7 and 25, 14,567 transactions are made per day and 199 ATMs remain 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. “But there is still a long way to go, I think, to become a currency that competes with, let’s say, more traditional currencies,” added the CABEI president in statements.
El Salvador became, on August 7, the first country in the world where bitcoin is legal tender as an exchange currency, together with the US dollar. The initiative has been rejected by the vast majority of the population, according to polls.