El Salvador loses half its investment in Bitcoin as crypto plunges

Are you a Bitcoin holder currently wallowing in despair seeing your crypto investment plunging off a cliff?

Don't worry. It can always be worse. You could be El Salvador.

El Salvador's president, Nayib Bukele, is a big crypto bro and he's invested big into Bitcoin. And when I say he invested in Bitcoin, I mean the El Salvadorian taxpayers have invested in Bitcoin because that's whose money he's used to buy Bitcoin.

As of June 13, 2022, El Salvador's Bitcoin investments are worth roughly halfwhat Bukele paid. 

Tweet may have been deleted

El Salvador doled outmore than $60,300 per Bitcoin in October 2021 when Buekele "bought the dip" and acquired 420 Bitcoins, the highest price per Bitcoin it paid. The lowest was just last month, on May 9, when Bukele once again"bought the dip" and acquired 500 Bitcoins for more than $30,700 each.

The current price of Bitcoin is around $23,000 and continuing to fall. This means that as of now, every purchase was a loser. There wasn't a single purchase made under the current value.

Mashable Light Speed Want more out-of-this world tech, space and science stories? Sign up for Mashable's weekly Light Speed newsletter. By clicking Sign Me Up, you confirm you are 16+ and agree to our Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. Thanks for signing up!

Tweet may have been deleted

The country of El Salvador currently holds 2,301 Bitcoin, valued around $53 million at the time of publishing. That's around 50 percent of the $105.6 million that Bukele invested.

The crypto market has tanked over the past month and a half, plagued by a series of events like the failure of the stablecoin Terraand the insolvency of a major DeFi lender, Celsius. Basically, anyone who discovered Bitcoin over the past 18 months and decided to invest (see: the mainstream public) is currently underwater.

This is obviously not good news for El Salvador, a country that was already facing financial turmoil. Bukele went all-in on Bitcoin and worked to make El Salvador the first country in the worldto accept Bitcoin as legal tender in September 2021. 

---

Related Stories

---

• Crypto is caving in. What's up?
• The biggest crypto scams of 2022 (so far)
• El Salvador wants to be the first nation in the world to treat bitcoin like cash

Shockingly, Bitcoin did not solve El Salvador's problems. Bukele, who has been described as an authoritarian by his critics, has still had to deal with the issues facing his country, such as a violent crime wave that led to Bukele jailing2 percent of El Salvador's adult population. On top of all that, he's had to deal with protests, which were blowback from the Bitcoin laws he helped create.

The falling crypto market hasn't changed Bukele's mind on Bitcoin either. Bukele had planned to issue "volcano bonds" in order to raise funds, which would have been used to create a "Bitcoin city." However, the bonds, which were supposed to launch in March, have since been postponed due to, well, the current crypto market conditions. 

Now, it's true that Bukele won't have technicallylost anything until he sells. Maybe if he keeps hodling, they'll recoup some of the money he's down. But time is not on El Salvador's side. Thanks in part to these failed Bitcoin experiments, El Salvador looks like it may possibly default.

The apparent lesson is that, shockingly, gambling away taxpayer money on highly speculative crypto investments is not a good way to run a country.