The Bitcoin Crash Is Taking El Salvador’s Big Bet With It

The ongoing crypto crash has managed to wipe out over 50 percent of the value of El Salvador’s Bitcoin hoard.

The Nayib Bukele tracker, named after the country’s Bitcoin-obsessed president, records each purchase the country announces, its cost basis, total reserves, and average cost basis of those reserves. Bukele has purchased 2,301 Bitcoins at an average cost of $45,908 and a total cost of $105.6 million. Today, with the price of Bitcoin hovering around $22,000, El Salvador’s reserves have shed 51 percent of their value and are worth $51.6 million. El Salvador’s embrace of Bitcoin has been bombastic, and widely lambasted by critics inside the country and out. Shortly before its most recent purchase on May 9, rating agency Moody’s downgraded the country’s debt. Before that, in January, the IMF recommended that El Salvador liquidate its Bitcoin holdings and abandon the cryptocurrency as legal tender, resulting in an angry rebuke from the government: Treasury Minister Alejandro Zelaya saying on local television that “no international organization is going to make us do anything, anything at all.”

Source: https://www.vice.com/en/article/n7zwj7/the-bitcoin-crash-is-taking-el-salvadors-big-bet-with-it