SAN SALVADOR — There are now more than half a million
people using El Salvador's Bitcoin wallet, President Nayib Bukele announced.
The country of 6.6 million people this month became the
first to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender alongside the US dollar, which has been
the official currency for two decades.
اضافة اعلان
"We currently have more than half a million users (of
the Chivo wallet)," Bukele tweeted late Monday.
The "Chivo Wallet" is an electronic application
that
Salvadorans can download — earning a $30 equivalent sign-up bonus in the
process — to make cryptocurrency transactions.
Bukele added that the wallet's technical errors had mostly
been resolved, and the software would be fully operational in days.
The initial rollout had met with difficulties as the Chivo
software had crashed, with Bitcoin losing some 17 percent of its value at one
point.
But Bukele wrote in his Twitter thread that "every day
more and more businesses accept payments in
Bitcoin or dollars".
The government says the project will give many Salvadorans
access to banking services for the first time, and hopes it will shave millions
off commissions on remittances, which account for more than a fifth of the
country's GDP.
But experts and regulators have highlighted concerns about
the cryptocurrency's notorious volatility, its potential impact on price
inflation in a nation with high poverty and unemployment, and the lack of
protection for users.
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