El Salvador‘s president, Nayib Bukele, declared that his country will begin purchasing one Bitcoin (BTC) per day. The statement comes three and a half months after El Salvador purchased its final Bitcoin in July 2022, paying $19,000 for each coin for 80 BTC.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele announced in a tweet that “We are buying one Bitcoin every day starting tomorrow.” El Salvador currently holds about 2,381 bitcoins, with an average purchase price of about $43,000 and a loss of about $54 million.
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) November 17, 2022
According to Buy Bitcoin Worldwide data, El Salvador purportedly owns 2,381 BTC at an average purchase price of $43,357. This amount is based mostly on when the President announced Bitcoin investments, but it cannot be validated because no public or on-chain record identifying the purchases has been published.
To date, the country has reportedly spent over $103.23 million on Bitcoin purchases. With the biggest cryptocurrency currently trading around $16,500, the true worth of its stockpile is $39.47 million, implying losses of more than $63 million.
Bukele has claimed in the past that El Salvador, the first country in the world to accept Bitcoin as legal tender, has never sold any of its crypto holdings, but he has never revealed the wallet addresses connected to the earlier purchases.
The President only provided photos of the alleged transactions when he purchased 80 Bitcoin this summer, indicating that El Salvador was using a centralized exchange to carry out trades.
Today’s declaration also comes in response to Bukele’s prior remarks on the FTX fiasco, in which he stated that “FTX is the opposite of Bitcoin” in a tweet earlier this week.
He stated that the purpose of the Bitcoin protocol “was created precisely to prevent Ponzi schemes, bank runs, Enron, WorldCom, Bernie Madoff, Sam Bankman-Fried,… bailouts, and wealth reallocations.”
