- El Salvador President Nayib Bukele has long been bullish on bitcoin.
- He wrote in a post on X that El Salvador is up more than 40% on its investment.
El Salvador is up big on its bitcoin bet, according to its millennial president Nayib Bukele.
On Wednesday, Bukele wrote in a post on X that the media ridiculed the country's sizable investment in the world's largest cryptocurrency. Now, however, bitcoin has surged more than 38% to start 2024, and Bukele says El Salvador could net a tidy profit if it sold now.
"[I]f we were to sell, we would make a profit of over 40% (just from the market purchases), and our main source of BTC is now our citizenship program," Bukele wrote, referring to the country's expedited citizenship offering for foreign bitcoin investors. Reuters reported in December that foreigners who contributed bitcoin "donations" to government programs would be eligible.
—Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) February 28, 2024
Bukele's tweet came the same day that bitcoin breached the $60,000 threshold for the first time since November 2021, fueled largely by interest in recently launched spot bitcoin ETFs and this spring's bitcoin halving event, which will reduce the amount of bitcoin rewarded to miners, driving the scarcity narrative that is an underlying factor in the long-term bull case for the cryptocurrency.
According to a CoinDesk analysis, El Salvador holds 2,381 bitcoins in total, purchased at an average price of $44,292.
Bitcoin was trading at $62,479 on Thursday morning, up by about 5%.
Bukele made waves in 2021 when he made El Salvador the first country to adopt cryptocurrency as legal tender. After entering office, he also introduced a crypto wallet to spread adoption and started buying up tokens as investments, which has drawn criticism from market watchers and commentators, including those at the International Monetary Fund.
"We won't sell, of course; at the end 1 BTC = 1 BTC (this was true when the market price was low and it's true now); but it's very telling that the authors of those hit pieces, the 'analysts', the 'experts', the 'journalists', are totally silent now," Bukele continued. "Remember this, next time they spill lies again about El Salvador."
Earlier this month, Bukele notched a landslide victory for re-election in El Salvador.