El Salvador Still Benefitting From Big Bitcoin Bet Says Finance Minister

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The finance min­is­ter of El Sal­vador has defend­ed the country’s Bit­coin strat­e­gy, high­light­ing the ben­e­fits that it has provided.

In an inter­view on July 27, Ale­jan­dro Zelaya said that the imple­men­ta­tion of Bit­coin as legal ten­der has enabled finan­cial ser­vices to a large­ly unbanked pop­u­la­tion. It has also attract­ed for­eign invest­ment and boost­ed tourism, he added.

Not every­one agrees, espe­cial­ly now that the asset is in the depths of a bear mar­ket. The exper­i­ment has been crit­i­cized by the Inter­na­tion­al Mon­e­tary Fund among others.

Zelaya remained unper­turbed, how­ev­er, stat­ing that while its usage as a cur­ren­cy remains low, he is still a believ­er in dig­i­tal mon­ey, adding:

“For some, it’s some­thing new and some­thing they don’t entire­ly under­stand, but it’s a phe­nom­e­non that exists and is gain­ing ground and will con­tin­ue to be around in the com­ing years.”

Bitcoin projects are still on track

Accord­ing to Bloomberg, the gov­ern­ment is still plan­ning to issue Bit­coin-backed bonds. Zelaya said this will hap­pen when mar­ket con­di­tions improve. The “Bit­coin City” plans are also still in motion and more incen­tives will be announced soon he added.

“We aren’t going to have results overnight. We can’t go to bed poor and wake up mil­lion­aires,” Zelaya commented.

“New tech­nolo­gies have shown how peo­ple in pre­vi­ous years were afraid of things like web­sites and dig­i­tal busi­ness, but it’s been shown through time that real­i­ty impos­es itself,” he added.

Zelaya said that he believes in the tra­di­tion­al, inter­na­tion­al mon­e­tary sys­tem just as he believes that “new tech­nolo­gies are going to help human beings in the future.”

El Salvador’s BTC stash cur­rent­ly stands at 2,381 coins worth $57 mil­lion at cur­rent prices. The coun­try would be down 47%, or $50 mil­lion if it liq­ui­dat­ed the lot today accord­ing to the Nay­ib Track­er web­site.

Ear­li­er this week, Pres­i­dent Nay­ib Bukele announced that the coun­try had enough fund­ing to vol­un­tar­i­ly buy back sov­er­eign debt bonds before they matured in 2023.

BTC Reclaims $24,000

Bit­coin and cryp­to mar­kets are in the green today as BTC topped $24,000 for the first time in sev­en weeks dur­ing the morn­ing hours of July 29.

At the time of press, BTC had cooled slight­ly to trade at $23,979 but it’s fac­ing strong resis­tance at cur­rent lev­els. A tech­ni­cal reces­sion fol­low­ing two quar­ters of neg­a­tive GDP in the Unit­ed States has not caused the cryp­to pan­ic sell­ing that many expected.

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