An official from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has confirmed that El Salvador is complying with an agreement to back away from using Bitcoin (BTC) as a reserve asset.
In a new press briefing, the IMF addresses a question from financial software company Ion Group asking how El Salvador is still accumulating BTC despite agreeing to stop making any more purchases as part of a loan agreement.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele pushed back against those conditions earlier this year, saying,
“’This all stops in April.’ ‘This all stops in June.’ ‘This all stops in December.’
No, it’s not stopping.
If it didn’t stop when the world ostracized us and most ‘Bitcoiners’ abandoned us, it won’t stop now, and it won’t stop in the future.
Proof of work > proof of whining.”
Data from the blockchain “de-anonymizer” Arkham shows that the El Salvador government has been acquiring one BTC every single day for some time.
But Rodrigo Valdes, the director of the IMF’s Western Hemisphere Department, says that despite these purchases, the country is still working within its “performance criteria” set forth by the IMF.
“In terms of El Salvador, let me say that I can confirm that they continue to comply with their commitment of non-accumulation of bitcoin by the overall fiscal sector, which is the performance criteria that we have. But on top of that, I think this is very important for the discussion in El Salvador.
The program of El Salvador is not about bitcoin. It’s much more, much deeper in structural reforms, in terms of governance, in terms of transparency. There is a lot of progress there. And also, on fiscal. And authorities have been making a lot of progress implementing the reform.”
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