El Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele has announced the transfer of a significant portion of the government’s Bitcoins to a cold wallet, also publishing its address on the X network. The publication reveals the scale of El Salvador’s Bitcoin investments, far surpassing estimates.
El Salvador has 2 times more Bitcoins than previously publicly announced
On Friday, March 15, 2024, Nayib Bukele, the President of El Salvador, declared that the government had opted to transfer a significant portion of its Bitcoins to a cold wallet, in order to secure them in a safe located on Salvadoran territory.
By disclosing the precise address and amount of its Bitcoin holdings, El Salvador is demonstrating a desire for transparency and following in the footsteps of Bitwise, an issuer of Bitcoin spot ETFs, which also recently chose to make its addresses public.
We’ve decided to transfer a big chunk of our Bitcoin to a cold wallet, and store that cold wallet in a physical vault within our national territory.
You can call it our first Bitcoin piggy bank
It’s not much, but it’s honest work pic.twitter.com/dqzedykxT1
– Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) March 14, 2024
“We have decided to transfer a large part of our Bitcoins to a cold wallet and store this cold wallet in a physical safe on our national territory. You can call it our first Bitcoin piggy bank. It’s not much, but it’s honest work. “
However, the revealed address indicates that the government owns at least 5,689 BTC, or around $390 million, which is almost double what it had previously disclosed. According to the purchase announcements made by Nayib Bukele, the government was supposed to own just 2,864 Bitcoins.
In addition, the recent publication by the President of El Salvador mentions “a large part of our Bitcoins”, suggesting the existence of other BTC in different wallets.
In December 2023, Nayib Bukele had shared a graphic from the Nayib Tracker website, which tracks the Salvadoran government’s Bitcoin investments based on its public announcements.
Salvadoran government Bitcoin wallet estimates
Today, it appears that these estimates were actually far lower than the number of Bitcoins actually held by El Salvador.
Although it is impossible to determine exactly how much profit El Salvador has accumulated, based on publicly announced investments, the recent rise in the price of Bitcoin has enabled it to generate a capital gain of around 60%, or $73 million.
