The Americas | Deep down in the crypto-dip

El Salvador’s bitcoin experiment is not paying off

The value of the country’s cryptocurrency has fallen by two-thirds

FILE - El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele participates in the closing ceremony of a congress for cryptocurrency investors in Santa Maria Mizata, El Salvador, Saturday, Nov. 20, 2021. Bukele has announced on the country’s Independence Day that he will seek re-election to a second five-year term, one year after the new justices of the Constitutional Chamber of the Supreme Court appointed by his allies in the Legislative Assembly overturned the country’s constitutional ban on consecutive re-election. (AP Photo/Salvador Melendez, File)

Nov 17th 2022

Will the fall in the price of bitcoin following the collapse of FTX, a cryptocurrency exchange, cause El Salvador’s bitcoin-backing president, Nayib Bukele, to reconsider his gamble with the country’s finances? So far Mr Bukele, who made bitcoin legal tender in September 2021, appears defiant. On November 17th he tweeted that his government will buy one bitcoin a day, after not having bought any in almost six months (see chart). He has also brushed off any criticism of his decision to buy it using public money. “Stop drinking the elites’ Kool-Aid and take a look at the facts,” he wrote two months ago.

This article appeared in the The Americas section of the print edition under the headline “Deep down in the crypto-dip”