El Salvador Adds 11 Bitcoin to Its Reserves—Despite IMF Pressure to Back Off BTC

El Salvador just added 11 Bitcoin to its reserves shortly after promising to limit its adoption.

El Salvador’s Bitcoin Office announced in a Jan. 20 Twitter post that it just added another 11 BTC to its Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. As of press time, 11 BTC are worth more than $1 million.

The announcement follows El Salvador promising the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that it would scale back its BTC adoptionin exchange for a $1.4 billion loan back in December 2024. Discussions around the deal were revealed earlier that month, with the IMF requesting El Salvador stop requiring businesses to accept Bitcoin and restrict the public sector's involvement in crypto activities.

Stacy Herbert, the head of El Salvador’s National Bitcoin Office, also announced in December 2024 that following the IMF deal the country would accelerate the pace of its BTC accumulation. The remarks follow the IMF insisting that El Salvador should limit its Bitcoin adoption multiple times.

El Salvador adopted Bitcoin as its legal tender alongside the U.S. dollar in September 2021 and has since received criticism from the IMF. The policy body warned in 2021 that the country’s move to make BTC legal tender raised “a number of macroeconomic, financial and legal issues.”

In August, the IMF admitted that many of the risks of the BTC experiment “had not yet materialized.” The organization wrote that “while many of the risks have not yet materialized, there is joint recognition that further efforts are needed to enhance transparency and mitigate potential fiscal and financial stability risks from the Bitcoin project.”

In October 2024, IMF spokesperson Julie Kozack was again quoted as saying that the IMF had recommended “limiting public sector exposure to Bitcoin.”

Edited by Stacy Elliott.