El Salvador’s Bitcoin Shuffle: A Tale of Wallets and Whimsy 🤷‍♂️

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In a world where the lines between reality and fantasy blur more with each passing day, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) has stepped in to set the record straight—much to the chagrin of Bitcoin enthusiasts everywhere. According to the IMF, El Salvador, the tiny Central American nation that once made headlines for embracing the digital currency with open arms, is not, in fact, buying more Bitcoin. Instead, they are simply shuffling their existing stash between different government-owned wallets, a move that leaves the country’s overall Bitcoin position as unchanged as a politician’s promise.

Is El Salvador Just Shuffling Bitcoin Wallets?

During a routine press briefing, IMF Communications Director Julie Kozack, with all the charm of a tax auditor, clarified the situation. “The total amount of BTC held across government-owned wallets remains unchanged, and that is consistent with El Salvador’s program commitments,” she stated, her voice as monotone as the bureaucratic jargon she spouted. Any apparent growth in the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Fund (SBRF) is nothing more than “movements across various government-owned wallets,” she added, with a shrug that could only be imagined.

This reassurance comes less than a month after the IMF Executive Board completed El Salvador’s 2025 Article IV consultation and first review of its 40-month Extended Fund Facility (EFF). This review, which one might liken to a particularly grueling dental checkup, unlocked a $118 million tranche, bringing total disbursements under the $1.4 billion arrangement to roughly $231 million. The EFF, with its ironclad grip on El Salvador’s finances, requires the Bukele administration to keep its net BTC exposure flat, ensuring that the country’s public finances follow what the IMF calls “a firm downward debt path.”

Just hours before the IMF’s clarifying remarks, El Salvador’s official Bitcoin Office took to X (formerly known as Twitter, but who’s keeping track?) to announce, “EL SALVADOR JUST BOUGHT MORE BITCOIN,” complete with a screenshot showing an 8 BTC purchase and a running total of 6,248.18 BTC—worth about $722 million at today’s spot price of roughly $116,000. The post was a perfect echo of President Nayib Bukele’s long-standing mantra, “one Bitcoin a day,” a slogan he has repeated with the enthusiasm of a carnival barker since November 2024.

However, the IMF, ever the party pooper, insists that these numbers are nothing more than an accounting mirage. While the SBRF’s wallet address may show incremental inflows, an equivalent amount is typically debited from other state-controlled wallets—most notably a treasury cold-storage address managed by the fiscal agency BANDESAL—leaving the republic’s consolidated position as stable as a three-legged stool. “Risks from Bitcoin continue to be mitigated,” Kozack emphasized, praising the “solid” overall programme performance, including fiscal and reserve targets “met with margins.”

Under the EFF’s technical memorandum of understanding, El Salvador must cap net crypto purchases by the non-financial public sector at the level in place when the program was approved last February. The goal is to prevent further volatility on a public balance sheet that already carries Bitcoin exposure equivalent to about 2 percent of GDP. Reuters reported in March that the IMF had already warned San Salvador against “adding to government cryptocurrency exposure,” even as officials continued to trumpet periodic buys like a broken record.

As of press time, neither President Bukele nor his Bitcoin adviser Max Keiser had responded publicly to the IMF’s statement. The Bitcoin Office account, meanwhile, has not deleted or amended its original post, leaving the digital world to speculate and gossip like a group of high school students in the cafeteria.

At press time, BTC traded at $

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2025-07-25 14:34