El Salvador’s government is still stacking sats on schedule. Treasury trackers now put the country’s bitcoin holdings above 7,600 coins — roughly $470 million at current prices — even after lawmakers rolled back mandatory legal-tender rules to satisfy the IMF. The signal for the rest of LatAm: the national DCA did not die with the headlines.

In September 2021, El Salvador became the first country to adopt bitcoin as legal tender. President Nayib Bukele pitched it as a way to bank the unbanked, attract investment, and hedge against dollar dependence. The Chivo wallet launched with a $30 signup bonus; adoption among everyday Salvadorans was always mixed, and volatility drew plenty of criticism at home and abroad.

Fast forward to early 2025. El Salvador secured a $1.4 billion IMF program, and legislators moved quickly to amend the Bitcoin Law. Reuters reported that the reform made bitcoin acceptance voluntary for merchants — no longer compulsory — while tax obligations could still be settled in BTC. The IMF had long urged caution on the experiment; the legal tweak was the political price of the bailout.

Many observers assumed that meant the experiment was winding down. The on-chain data tells a different story.

The daily buy keeps running

Independent treasury trackers agree the government is still accumulating. BitcoinTreasuries.net lists El Salvador at ₿7,674 as of June 6, 2026, with a net asset value near $469.8 million — ranking it #5 among government bitcoin holders worldwide, behind the United States, China, the UK, and Ukraine (official holdings), and ahead of the UAE and Bhutan.

CoinDesk reported in January that the country made its “usual purchase of 1 bitcoin” alongside a separate $50 million gold buy by the central bank, bringing reported government holdings to 7,547 BTC at the time. That one-coin-per-day rhythm — a form of dollar-cost averaging, or DCA — has been Bukele’s public stacking cadence for years. The January report shows it continued well after the IMF deal and the legal-tender rollback.

By December 2025, the IMF itself was striking a softer tone. Staff praised ~4% real GDP growth and noted progress in bitcoin-related discussions with authorities — even as El Salvador added more than 1,000 BTC during November’s market downturn, per CoinDesk’s summary of the fund’s review. Tension eased; accumulation did not.

Holdings are spread across multiple on-chain addresses rather than parked in a single wallet — a custody pattern consistent with spreading counterparty and operational risk. Exact address attribution varies by tracker (some figures land in the 7,400–7,700 range depending on labeling), but the direction is consistent: net additions, not divestment.

Why this matters beyond El Salvador

For a sovereign treasury, DCA is a policy choice, not a trade call. Buying one bitcoin every day regardless of price removes timing drama and builds a long-dated reserve asset position. Whether that is prudent reserve management or speculative exposure is debated — the IMF’s historical skepticism is on the record — but the mechanics are transparent enough for anyone with a block explorer to verify inflows over time.

The stack also sits alongside traditional reserves. The January gold purchase shows El Salvador treating hard assets as a bundle: bitcoin plus bullion, not either-or. At ~$470 million, the BTC position is material for a small economy but not dominant relative to total government finances — which is partly why the IMF engagement continued even as coins kept arriving.

For crypto-native companies, El Salvador’s framework still matters operationally. Firms like Mexico’s Aureo operate as registered Bitcoin Service Providers under the country’s rules — a regulated LatAm beachhead even as the retail legal-tender mandate faded. The treasury strategy and the licensing regime are related but distinct: one is balance-sheet policy, the other is industry infrastructure.

The LatAm angle

Latin America is not short on bitcoin curiosity. Argentina’s households lean on stablecoins to escape peso volatility; Brazil’s cross-border stablecoin flows draw central-bank attention; Mexico’s Lightning on-ramps keep shipping. But only El Salvador has run a nation-state stacking program at this scale and duration.

That makes it a live case study for the region. Smaller economies watching dollar dependence, remittance costs, and inflation hedges can see what a sovereign DCA looks like in practice — including the political cost (IMF conditions, legal rollbacks) and the operational choices (multi-address custody, parallel gold buys). It is not a template every country will copy, but it is the only full-scale experiment on the board.

For Salvadorans, the day-to-day story is more muted than the treasury headlines. Merchant acceptance is voluntary now; Chivo’s early adoption numbers never matched the government’s ambitions. The national stack grows quietly in the background while most households still live in dollars. The policy bet is long-term reserve accumulation, not a mandate that every coffee shop take Lightning.

Neighboring governments and regional fintech teams are paying attention anyway. When a country keeps buying through drawdowns — adding 1,000+ coins in a single rough month — it signals conviction that outlasts press-release cycles. In a week when bitcoin bounced above $61,000 after a sharp rout, the contrast is worth noting: traders liquidated; San Salvador kept scheduling its daily buy.

Takeaway

El Salvador did not abandon bitcoin when it renegotiated with the IMF. It narrowed the retail mandate — merchants can say no — and kept the treasury engine running at one coin per day. Trackers now put the pile above 7,600 BTC, worth nearly half a billion dollars, with the government ranked among the world’s top sovereign holders.

That is news because it contradicts the “experiment is over” narrative that followed the 2025 legal reforms. For LatAm readers weighing self-custody and hard-money reserves at every scale — personal, corporate, or national — the lesson is structural: policy concessions and stacking policy can diverge. Watch the chain, not just the press conference.

Not financial advice. Bitcoin is volatile; sovereign treasury decisions involve political and macroeconomic risks beyond any single asset. Do your own research.

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