El Salvador did not use public money to grow its Bitcoin stockpile after mid-2025, the International Monetary Fund said Thursday. The lender confirmed the added coins came from private donati
El Salvador did not use public money to grow its Bitcoin stockpile after mid-2025, the International Monetary Fund said Thursday. The lender confirmed the added coins came from private donations, not state purchases.
The statement came alongside the IMF's staff-level agreement on the combined second and third review of El Salvador's $1.4 billion loan program. The IMF said documents supplied by Salvadoran authorities verified that the accumulation came from private donations, and that the increase in the country's Bitcoin holdings did not reflect additional purchases financed with government resources.
The IMF also addressed Chivo, the state-built Bitcoin wallet. Majority ownership and operational control of Chivo has moved to a private operator, while the government kept a minority stake and custodial duties. The fund does not expect further Bitcoin accumulation beyond what has already been documented as donations.
Why This Question Existed
El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender in 2021 and began buying coins for a public treasury. That policy sat awkwardly next to any future IMF program, since the fund generally treats volatile, unbacked assets on a sovereign balance sheet as a risk to reserves and fiscal stability.
In February 2025, the IMF approved a 40-month, $1.4 billion Extended Fund Facility for El Salvador, with an immediate disbursement of about $113 million. Multilateral lenders including the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and others were expected to add financing, building a package above $3.5 billion over the program's life.
To get the deal, El Salvador agreed to real limits on its Bitcoin activity. In December 2024, ahead of formal approval, the government agreed to make private-sector Bitcoin acceptance voluntary, require taxes in US dollars, and unwind government involvement in Chivo. In March 2025, the IMF went further, issuing documents that barred outright "voluntary accumulation" of Bitcoin by the public sector.
President Nayib Bukele pushed back publicly. He said the purchases were "not stopping" and that the government would keep adding at least one Bitcoin a day. That daily-buy pledge, tracked openly by the National Bitcoin Office, became a visible test of how far the country would bend to IMF terms.
The First Review And A Recurring Question
The IMF completed the first review of the EFF arrangement on June 27, 2025, releasing about SDR 86.16 million, roughly $118 million, and bringing total disbursements to $231 million. The fund called the program's performance solid, with fiscal and reserve targets met with margins.
But the Bitcoin Office kept posting daily accumulation updates after that review, which did not square easily with the March restrictions. In July 2025, the IMF offered an initial explanation, saying no new Bitcoin had actually been purchased since the December 2024 agreement, and that the reported increases came from consolidating existing coins across government wallets.
That explanation held for a few months. Then in November 2025, El Salvador reported it had acquired 1,090 BTC worth about $100 million, a figure that reopened the compliance question directly. An IMF representative told Cointelegraph at the time that the fund would not offer "running commentary" and would assess compliance in due course.
What Changed This Week
Through late 2025 and into 2026, IMF mission chief Enrique Torres described talks on the second review as progressing against a backdrop of improved economic performance, with record remittances and investment, and GDP growth projected around 4%. The fund also confirmed that negotiations over selling the state-run Chivo wallet were advancing, with emphasis on transparency and protecting public resources.
Thursday's statement resolves the specific question that had lingered since November: where did the added Bitcoin come from. The IMF's answer is that private donors, not the treasury, funded the growth, and that Chivo's ownership structure now reflects the unwind the government promised back in December 2024.
According to the National Bitcoin Office's public reserve tracker, El Salvador currently holds about 7,764 BTC. At a Bitcoin price near $80,900, that stockpile is worth roughly $628 million. That balance sits well above where holdings stood before the IMF agreement took effect, a gap the IMF now attributes entirely to donations rather than state buying.
What This Means Going Forward
The clearance lets the IMF program move forward without a compliance dispute hanging over it, which matters for continued disbursements toward the full $1.4 billion facility. It also gives Bukele a way to keep the country's Bitcoin narrative alive without technically breaching fund conditions, since donated coins fall outside the ban on public-sector purchases.
The tradeoff is that El Salvador's Bitcoin policy now runs on a narrower track than in 2021. Public-sector buying is over, private Bitcoin acceptance is voluntary rather than mandatory, and Chivo is largely out of government hands. The reserve keeps growing, but the mechanism behind it has changed completely from the original legal-tender experiment.
