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Almost a Third of Salvadorans Are Using the Bitcoin Wallet, Bukele Says
Some 2.1 million people are actively using Chivo, the president said.
Almost a third of Salvadorans are actively using the Chivo bitcoin wallet less than a month after the country adopted the cryptocurrency as legal tender, President Nayib Bukele said in a tweet.
- Some 2.1 million people are using the wallet, Bukele said in a tweet. That’s more users than any bank in the country, he said. El Salvador has a population of about 6.5 million people, according the CIA World Factbook.
2.1 million Salvadorans are ACTIVELY USING @chivowallet (not downloads).
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) September 25, 2021
Chivo is not a bank, but in less than 3 weeks, it now has more users than any bank in El Salvador and is moving fast to have more users that ALL BANKS IN EL SALVADOR combined.
This is wild!#Bitcoin🇸🇻
STORY CONTINUES BELOW
- El Salvador started using bitcoin as legal tender on Sept. 7, three months after the country’s legislature passed the Bitcoin Law. It runs in parallel with the U.S. dollar, which has been the currency since 2001.
- El Salvador is using cryptocurrency wallet company BitGo to provide Chivo’s underlying technology.
- Earlier this month, demonstrators against the rollout in the capital San Salvador set fire to a Chivo ATM, designed to exchange dollars for bitcoin.
See also: Why El Salvador Is Botching Its Bitcoin Experiment
Sheldon Reback
Sheldon Reback is CoinDesk editorial's Regional Head of Europe. Before joining the company, he spent 26 years as an editor at Bloomberg News, where he worked on beats as diverse as stock markets and the retail industry as well as covering the dot-com bubble of 2000-2002. He managed the Bloomberg Terminal's main news page and also worked on a global project to produce short, chart-based stories across the newsroom. He previously worked as a journalist for a number of technology magazines in Hong Kong. Sheldon has a degree in industrial chemistry and an MBA. He owns ether and bitcoin below CoinDesk's notifiable limit.
