Five years ago yesterday, El Salvador’s Congress voted 62-to-22 to pass the world’s first Bitcoin Law, making the small Central American nation the first country on earth to grant bitcoin legal tender status.
The date was June 8, 2021. Half a decade later, the government holds 7,677 BTC worth approximately $480 million — and it is still accumulating.
The country has run a dollar-cost averaging strategy since President Nayib Bukele announced a policy of purchasing one bitcoin per day in November 2022. In the 12 months since June 2025, El Salvador added more than 1,600 BTC to its stack, including a tactical purchase of over 1,000 BTC in a single week during a November market dip.
At the start of 2026, the Bitcoin Office declared the country was going “all in” on both bitcoin and artificial intelligence.
That conviction survived a major policy reversal. In January 2025, Bukele’s administration stripped bitcoin of its mandatory legal tender status as a condition of a $1.4 billion IMF loan package. Businesses are no longer legally required to accept it, and the government-issued Chivo wallet — the centerpiece of Bukele’s original pitch — is being phased out.
But the government has not sold a single coin from its treasury and BTC is still able to be used as a currency for those who wish to use it.
El Salvador: No taxes on bitcoin
El Salvador offers no capital gains tax on bitcoin or cryptocurrency transactions, a policy the government doubled down on in early 2026 to court foreign investors. The country is also developing plans for a “Volcano Bond” backed by bitcoin and a proposed Bitcoin City powered by geothermal energy.
The remittance case that Bukele used to sell the law to the public has yet to materialize at scale. El Salvador is one of the most remittance-dependent economies in the world — personal transfers from abroad equal roughly 24 percent of GDP, with Q1 2026 totaling $2.43 billion. Crypto accounted for just $17.38 million of that figure, or 0.71 percent of the total.
