Objectives, actual use and changes following the agreement with the IMF
In September 2021, El Salvador became the first country to introduce Bitcoin as legal tender. President Nayib Bukele announced the plan in June 2021 at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami, with the government citing the financial inclusion of citizens without a bank account, cheaper remittances from abroad, and attracting investment as the main goals. In early 2025, as part of an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the rules were changed: acceptance of Bitcoin by the private sector became voluntary, and taxes are paid exclusively in US dollars.
Five years after the introduction of the law, research, data from the World Bank and IMF reports are available. Based on them, it is possible to compare what was announced, how Bitcoin was actually used in the country and what changed after the agreement with the IMF.
Source: cointelegraph
What has the government introduced?
With the law, the state-owned Chivo wallet was launched, through which citizens could receive and send Bitcoin and dollars free of charge. Users who registered through the app were offered an initial incentive of $30 in Bitcoin. According to an analysis by researchers Tobias Boos, Juan Grigera and Lina Schmid, the state set up a FIDEBITCOIN fund to convert dollars into Bitcoin with an initial $150 million and set up about 150 Chivo ATMs in El Salvador and 50 in the United States.
The starting point was a low level of banking involvement. According to the same World Bank indicator, based on Global Findex surveys, in 2021, 35.8 percent of the population over the age of 15 had an account with a financial institution or mobile money service provider, and in 2024, 43.4 percent. World Bank data does not show how much Bitcoin contributed to this growth.
Source: cointelegraph
How much has Bitcoin really been used?
Economists Fernando Alvarez, David Argente and Diana Van Patten conducted a survey on a representative sample of 1,800 households, and the results were released in 2022 by the US National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). According to that survey, half of households downloaded the Chivo app after the law came into force, but more than 60 percent of those who downloaded it early did not make any transactions after spending the initial $30 in Bitcoin.
The research also showed that the application is intensively used by a smaller group of users, mostly young, educated men who already have a bank account, i.e. a group for which the measure was not primarily intended. At the time of the survey, Bitcoin was accepted by about 20 percent of companies, about 5 percent of sales were paid for with Bitcoin through Chiva, and 88 percent of companies converted received Bitcoin into dollars.
Source: cointelegraph
Remittances and financial inclusion
Remittances from abroad were an important part of the rationale. According to the World Bank, they accounted for 24.3 percent of El Salvador’s GDP in 2024 and 27.5 percent in 2025, while 98 percent of remittances come from the United States, according to Boos et al. Since El Salvador has used the U.S. dollar as its official currency since 2001, there is no conversion cost for these remittances. This does not mean that remittances are cost-free: according to the same authors, the fees for sending money to El Salvador are lower than in the region, partly due to dollarization, but they can still amount to up to 9 percent of the transaction amount.
Bitcoin can change the way and costs of sending money, but Boos and colleagues, citing central bank data, state that only about 1 percent of remittances passed through crypto services in 2024, so their data does not show that it has reduced the overall cost of remittances. According to their conclusion, the available data does not confirm that the introduction of Bitcoin has increased the level of banking involvement, and there is no evidence that the project has led to an increase in foreign investment, noting that existing data does not allow definitive conclusions about this effect.
Source: cointelegraph
What has changed since the agreement with the IMF?
El Salvador reached an agreement with the IMF at the expert team level in December 2024, and the IMF Executive Board approved a 40-month arrangement worth around $1.4 billion on February 26, 2025. According to the IMF, the arrangement should provide a total of more than $3.5 billion in financing, with the support of other international institutions. The amendments to the Bitcoin law described in the introduction were implemented as a prerequisite for approval, and the government committed under the program to limit public sector participation in Bitcoin-related activities, including government transactions and purchases of Bitcoin, and to phase out the Chivo wallet.
In the October 2025 analysis, Boos et al. indicated that Chivo had ceased operations according to the information available at the time, that the National Bitcoin Bureau continued to publish the purchases, and that due to a lack of transparency, compliance with the agreement could not be assessed. More recent IMF disclosures from September and October 2026 describe the situation more precisely: majority ownership and operational control of Chivo has been transferred to a private operator, the State has retained a minority stake and custody of the beneficiary’s assets, and the remaining public sector exposure has yet to be fully removed.
On October 1, 2026, the IMF completed the second and third revisions of the program and approved exemptions for certain unfulfilled criteria related to Bitcoin accumulation based on remedial measures. According to the IMF, the authorities provided documentation according to which the Bitcoin collected after the first audit came from private donations, without public funds, and no further accumulation other than these donations is expected. According to an analysis by Boos et al. from October 2025, the Bitcoin City and Volcano bond projects had not been realized by then.
Source: cointelegraph
How is the experiment evaluated by different parties?
Tobias Boos, a researcher at the University of Vienna, estimates that the project has not met the objectives with which the government explained it. According to him, foreign investment in the sector has not increased, it has not been confirmed that the project has increased the financial inclusion of citizens without a bank account and is not used to a greater extent for remittances.
Samson Mow, CEO of JAN3, highlights the other side. In his opinion, Bitcoin has gained proof of concept through El Salvador and El Salvador international visibility. The local Bitcoin Beach project in El Zonte existed even before the 2021 law and is still active today, but systematic data on how many local businesses receive Bitcoin today is not available.
Available research and data show that Bitcoin has not spread in El Salvador as a means of everyday payments and remittances, while proponents of the experiment highlight its impact on the debate over how states can access Bitcoin.