El Salvadorans Embrace Bitcoin Despite Problems with the National Wallet

Despite reported issues with Chivo wallet, the citizens of El Salvador actively embrace bitcoin as their second national currency. About 25% of the population shifted to cryptocurrency including Bitcoin (BTC).

Before the country adopted BTC as a legal tender, about 70% of El Salvador’s working population was unbanked, however, the revolution of cryptocurrencies has gradually revolutionized the financial system in the country.

On Sept 17, the BTC Chivo Wallet had registered over 1.1 million Salvadorans and by Sept 20, President Nayib Bukele revealed that the country’s Bitcoin app was being used by a huge number of people (around 1.6 million Salvadorans) and the number keeps on increasing every day.

Bitcoin to substitute fiat currency

Considering the fact that the government just recognized Bitcoin as its national currency on Sept 7, it is impressive to see such a big magnitude of people signing up for Wallet to start using Bitcoin. Since about 25% of the population has already signed up for the Bitcoin program, it shows that about a quarter of Salvadorians have got access to banking and this gives them quick access and utilization of Bitcoin cryptocurrency.

Regardless of the skyrocketing number of citizens rushing to sign up for Bitcoin in Chivo, it seems there is still a big number of Salvadorans that don’t trust Bitcoin - about 70% don’t wish to use BTC for regular payments and transactions.

Following the introduction of BTC in the country, the world’s largest crypto by market cap saw a massive gain in value by touching a high price of $52k but later touched a low of $45k after Chivo wallet faced some serious difficulties. 

Albeit, President Bukele later assured the citizens that the problems in the wallet were fixed, but the users of the wallet still continued reporting difficulties in the system.