In the middle of a steep market drop, El Salvador revealed that it added 1,090 BTC to its national holdings, making it the biggest-ever single-day Bitcoin purchase of the country. The government’s Bitcoin Office reported that the country made the buy at around 6:01 p.m. ET with spending around $100 million, and thus the total reserves went up to 7,474 BTC, worth close to $676 million at the moment.
The purchase time was also the time when the Bitcoin price was going under $90,000, its lowest level since April, according to the officials’ reference to the price data. President Nayib Bukele has been consistent in his practice of purchasing Bitcoin when the price is significantly lowered, and the government has been carrying out a daily buying plan of 1 BTC per day from November 2022 onwards.
However, the deal on Monday surpassed the normal level of accumulations by far, and it is the greatest single addition ever recorded by the administration. To further cement his position, Bukele also tweeted a purchase screenshot to his official X account, which is his way of saying that El Salvador’s Bitcoin buying plan will go on no matter what the market is like.
It’s still not clear if El Salvador directly bought 1,090 BTC from the open market. The country’s loan contract, worth $1.4 billion with the International Monetary Fund, quite emphatically prohibits any new Bitcoin purchases by the public sector; thus, questions are raised about how that recent addition was achieved.
In July, top finance officials asserted that El Salvador had not bought any Bitcoins since February, which is a direct disproof of Bukele’s public statements and thus points to discrepancies between the disclosed information and wallet activity as per blockchain. Later on, the IMF report made it clear that the upticks in government Bitcoin holdings were the result of consolidating BTC across the state-controlled wallets and not new purchases.
Stacy Herbert, who is in charge of the Bitcoin Office, has been contradicting these explanations on numerous occasions, and she maintains that despite external pressure from the IMF, El Salvador keeps on buying Bitcoin. She said earlier this year that some people who watch the situation might wrongly believe the IMF’s story rather than the on-chain data, which clearly shows that the government is still accumulating. The differences in the statements of the IMF, the Finance Ministry, and Bukele’s office have become a stumbling block for the truth about the scale and method of El Salvador’s Bitcoin purchase strategy.
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