El Salvador's bitcoin bet, five years in: still buying, still mining volcanoes, still fighting the IMF over the count

El Salvador's National Bitcoin Office (ONBTC) has run a public one-bitcoin-a-day accumulation narrative since November 2022, and it has never stopped announcing purchases. The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve stood at 7,696 BTC as of late June 2026 — up from 5,968 BTC when a $1.4 billion IMF loan program formalized in December 2024. On the surface, that's straightforward continuity: a government that said it would buy bitcoin every day, still buying bitcoin every day.

Except the IMF's Extended Fund Facility, approved in February 2025, includes a continuous performance criterion — not a suggestion, a condition tied to loan disbursement — setting a hard zero ceiling on new voluntary bitcoin accumulation by the public sector. IMF spokesperson Julie Kozack has said since July 2025 that the reserve's growth reflects consolidation of coins across existing government-owned wallets, not net new market purchases. Salvadoran officials have disputed that characterization while continuing to publicize daily buys. Both governments have an incentive to let the ambiguity stand: El Salvador keeps its narrative and its loan; the IMF keeps the appearance of enforced conditionality.

The mining side of the story is smaller and older than the DCA headline suggests. Since 2021, El Salvador has diverted about 1.5 megawatts from a state-owned geothermal plant tapping the Tecapa volcano to run roughly 300 mining machines. By mid-2024 that operation had mined about 474 BTC — worth around $29 million at the time — a modest but real example of a government mining its own reserve asset with domestic renewable power instead of buying it on the open market.

The bigger bet is Volcano Energy, a public-private partnership building wind, solar, and geothermal generation capacity specifically to fund large-scale mining, with Tether as an equity investor and advisor and Luxor Technology providing pool infrastructure through a joint venture known as Lava Pool. The approach is sequenced deliberately: solar and wind capacity comes online first to start monetizing sooner, while the project builds toward tapping El Salvador's volcanic geothermal resources at real scale. Bukele has floated extending the model further — a "rent your volcano" program that would let outside mining operations lease access to the country's geothermal capacity.

Not in any clean, traceable sense. Bukele has said publicly that accumulation comes from a mix of sources — mining output, passport sales, currency conversion services, and other government revenue — not from mining proceeds alone funding a literal daily purchase. The Tecapa operation's 474 BTC over roughly three years is a rounding error next to the more than 1,700 BTC the reserve added between December 2024 and June 2026 alone. Whatever is driving the reserve's growth now, it isn't primarily volcano-mined coins.

No, at least not the headline policy. Bitcoin has fallen roughly 19% over recent weeks and traded down into the high $50,000s to low $60,000s through late June 2026, pulling the reserve's value down from a peak near $800 million earlier in the year to somewhere around $450–480 million depending on the day counted. El Salvador has not sold a single coin from the treasury. That's a meaningfully different posture than Strategy's, the largest corporate holder, which began selling small amounts of bitcoin in June 2026 to cover cash needs — a sovereign reserve, insulated from shareholder redemptions and quarterly earnings pressure, can absorb a drawdown that a public company's capital structure cannot.

None of this happened in isolation. As a condition of the same IMF loan, El Salvador's Legislative Assembly amended the 2021 Bitcoin Law in February 2025: merchant acceptance became voluntary rather than mandatory, taxes became payable only in dollars, and the government began winding down the Chivo wallet that had been the original law's centerpiece. Bitcoin's role as an accepted currency has receded even as the treasury position has not — the reserve and the legal-tender experiment turned out to be two separable bets, and only one of them survived the IMF negotiation intact.

BITCOIN ALMANACK ANALYSIS

The reserve since the IMF deal

Figures as publicly reported by ONBTC and tracked by BitcoinTreasuries/CoinGecko; the IMF disputes that the increase reflects new purchases · Table: Bitcoin Almanack

WHY IT MATTERS

El Salvador is the live test case for whether a sovereign can hold — and keep growing — a bitcoin treasury while inside an active IMF program, so long as headline macro targets stay on track. Its remittance pitch has mostly failed: crypto-linked remittances were $17.38 million against $2.43 billion in total transfers in Q1 2026, well under 1%. But the treasury bet has survived a policy rollback, a bear market, and a direct dispute with its own lender — which is the part other governments weighing sovereign bitcoin reserves are actually watching.

SOURCES & DATA

IMF — El Salvador Extended Fund Facility program documents ↗ Bitcoin Magazine — five years of El Salvador's bitcoin law ↗ Bitcoin.com News — reserve accumulation through the 2026 drawdown ↗

Reserve figures are as publicly reported by El Salvador's National Bitcoin Office and tracked by third-party services; the IMF's characterization of reserve growth is disputed by Salvadoran officials. Not investment advice — see our editorial process and corrections policy.

Marisol Vega

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