IMF says El Salvador won't buy more Bitcoin after securing a $1.4B loan

The International Monetary Fund has maintained that El Salvador isn’t buying more Bitcoin after signing a financing agreement to reduce its BTC activity. However, the recent digital asset purchases by the country’s President, Nayib Bukele, seem to contradict the fund’s statement.

El Salvador secured a loan of $1.4 billion on the condition that it reduce its Bitcoin activity and halt its BTC purchases. Bukele had announced in November 2022 that the country would purchase one BTC daily.

El Salvador purchases more BTC

Buying 21 bitcoin for Bitcoin Day. pic.twitter.com/3X4yKeiqzg

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) September 7, 2025

President Nayib Bukele announced over the weekend an additional purchase of 21 BTC to celebrate the fourth anniversary of El Salvador’s Bitcoin Law. The purchase added another $2.3 million worth of Bitcoin to the government’s new, transparent blockchain coffers.

On-chain data shows that El Salvador has around 6,318 BTC worth around $726.8 million. The country’s Bitcoin Office matches the data, but indicates that El Salvador has added 28 BTC in the last 7 days and 51 BTC in the last 30 days.

The IMF disputes the data, claiming that both parties signed a deal that forced the country to scale back its Bitcoin experiment. The fund argued that the BTC purchases are all bunk. 

“We can confirm that the total amount of government-owned Bitcoin has not increased and that the increase in the Bitcoin Reserve Fund corresponds to movements across government wallets.”

-Meera Louis, Communications Officer at IMF.

The El Salvador government’s communications department revealed that the President is purchasing more Bitcoin. On-chain data also shows that the country’s BTC wallets are growing by 1 BTC daily, with deposits from cryptocurrency exchanges like Binance, Bitfinex, and other random addresses.

The country had previously limited transparency regarding BTC purchases, since they were only traceable via Bukele’s tweets. The President would irreverently boast about his buys, once saying he bought BTC on his phone while in the toilet.

Crypto analytics firm Bubblemaps argued that there’s no way to confirm on the blockchain when the Bitcoin being transferred today was actually purchased. The firm believes that the country may have purchased the BTC some time ago, before the 2024 deal with the IMF, and the digital assets remained dormant in a crypto exchange account before arriving in publicly disclosed wallets.

Bubblemaps also explained that El Salvador’s recent transactions could have been routed through exchanges to make it look like they were fresh purchases. The analytics firm asserted that it’s impossible to ascertain since third parties cannot access an exchange’s ledger of transactions without the exchange releasing the data itself.

Bukele defies IMF agreement

Founder and CEO of Hxagon, James Bosworth, said there should have been more transparency with the buys from the beginning, whether or not the BTC purchases are new. He argued that Bukele was not purchasing all of the BTC on the open market, but instead moving the digital assets around as a type of government-backed wash trade.

Bosworth asserted that the President’s unprofessional management of Bitcoin continues to obscure the budget situation. He said the digital assets should be the Salvadoran government’s and people’s resources and not Bukele’s personal wallets that he can use to play trading games.

Even after the agreement, Bukele still claims he’s doing what he wants in defiance of the IMF. He said in March that the purchases will not stop. The President stated that if the purchases didn’t stop when the world ostracized El Salvador and most bitcoiners abandoned the country, it would not stop now or in the future.

A letter signed by Central Bank President Douglas Pablo Rodriguez Fuentes and Minister of Finance Jerson Rogelio Posada Molina on July 15 revealed that El Salvador had provided the addresses of all hot and cold wallets to the IMF for review and monitoring. The IMF said that the stock of Bitcoins held by the public sector remains unchanged.

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