IMF says El Salvador's post-June 2025 bitcoin holdings came from private donations

The IMF confirmed on September 3 that El Salvador has not used public funds to accumulate bitcoin since the fund's last program review. In a Thursday report, the IMF said the country received bitcoin from private donations, citing documentation provided by the Salvadoran government to verify the claim. The IMF also stated that the government had transferred majority ownership and operational control of Chivo, its state-backed digital wallet launched in 2021, to a private operator. Public participation in the government-sponsored wallet has been largely wound down, per Bitcoin Magazine's reporting of the IMF statement. The fund imposed a constraint that no further bitcoin accumulation beyond the documented donations is expected going forward. The IMF said it reached understandings with El Salvador on steps to modernize the legal, regulatory, and supervisory framework for digital assets and to strengthen governance and risk-management arrangements for public-sector crypto-asset holdings. One year earlier, according to Decrypt's reporting, the IMF had claimed El Salvador's total bitcoin holdings had not moved and were merely being shuffled between government wallets, suggesting earlier opacity about the true acquisition history. President Nayib Bukele pledged in 2022 that the country would buy one bitcoin per day, though the source of those purchases remained unclear. In 2024, Bukele acknowledged that Salvadorans were not using cryptocurrency to buy goods as originally anticipated but maintained that the government was continuing to accumulate holdings. El Salvador became the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender in 2021.