Last night, El Salvador increased its BTC reserve by nearly 17% with 1,090 new bitcoins. Is this the result of a new purchase or simply a transfer?
El Salvador reportedly purchased an additional 1,090 bitcoins
As BTC dipped back below $90,000, Nayib Bukele posted a tweet overnight showing that El Salvador had added just over 1,090 bitcoins to its strategic national reserve:
Tweet from Nayib Bukele
With the total now reaching 7,474.37 units, this addition represents a 16.82% increase in the size of the country’s reserve, bringing its estimated value to $668 million.
In this case, the transaction in question today used 28 UTXOs to consolidate them into 3 new ones:
Transaction of 1,090 BTC to El Salvador’s reserve
Nearly a year ago, El Salvador finally reached an agreement with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to secure financing. This agreement involved concessions regarding the country’s pro-Bitcoin initiatives. For the past few months, the question has therefore been whether the country is actually continuing to buy BTC, or whether the observed transactions are in reality merely transfers between unofficial and official addresses.
On several occasions, however, the IMF has maintained that El Salvador is honoring its commitments by no longer purchasing new bitcoins, as Rodrigo Valdés, Director of the Western Hemisphere Department, stated last April:
Regarding El Salvador, I can confirm that the country continues to honor its commitment not to accumulate bitcoins in the fiscal sector, which is a key performance criterion.
Mining revenue? Consolidation of previously purchased bitcoins? Actual purchases and a defiant stance toward the IMF? El Salvador’s true BTC holdings are thus difficult to estimate, but the fact remains that today, the Salvadoran government ranks as the 5th country with the most bitcoins in the world, according to official figures.
Meanwhile, the price of BTC stands at $89,900 at the time of writing, down 5.9% over the past 24 hours.
