El Salvador's Bitcoin Reserve: One Address, Then Fourteen

El Salvador's Bitcoin Law was approved by the Legislative Assembly by 62 of 84 votes in an overnight session on 8-9 June 2021, and took effect on 7 September 2021. Article 7 obliged every economic agent to accept bitcoin when offered; Article 14 required a trust at the state development bank BANDESAL to guarantee automatic and instantaneous convertibility of bitcoin to dollars. Notably, the law said nothing about the state itself accumulating bitcoin. The reserve that followed was a matter of executive practice, not statute.

The institution that now curates it came later. The Oficina Nacional del Bitcoin (ONBTC) was created by Executive Decree No. 49, published in the Official Gazette on 17 November 2022 and signed by President Nayib Bukele and the Minister of Tourism, as a specialised administrative unit with functional and technical autonomy inside the office of the president. Stacy Herbert directs it. On 16 November 2022 Bukele announced the country would begin buying one bitcoin per day; holdings were reported at 2,381 BTC.

For its first years the reserve was unauditable: there were figures, but no address. That changed on 15 March 2024, when Bukele published 32ixEdVJWo3kmvJGMTZq5jAQVZZeuwnqzo and said 5,689 BTC had been moved into cold storage held in a physical vault within national territory, what he called the country's "first Bitcoin piggy bank." On-chain, that address took its first deposit, 1,120.99980025 BTC, in block 834,426, mined 13 March 2024, two days before the announcement. In May 2024 the ONBTC put up bitcoin.gob.sv, a self-hosted mempool explorer, making the position watchable in real time.

Transparency then met the IMF. On 18 December 2024 staff reached agreement on a 40-month, $1.4bn Extended Fund Facility; on 29 January 2025 the Assembly amended the Bitcoin Law by 55 votes to 2, modifying six articles and repealing three. Acceptance became voluntary, bitcoin could no longer settle taxes, and the state withdrew from the Chivo wallet. The Executive Board approved the programme on 26 February 2025 with an initial disbursement of roughly $113m. A condition barred voluntary accumulation of bitcoin by the public sector. The ONBTC kept announcing purchases anyway; on 4 March 2025 Bukele posted that it was "not stopping." Reported holdings moved from 6,101.15 BTC on 4 March 2025 to 6,189.18 BTC by late May, when the Fund said "efforts will continue" to hold the position flat. Whether that growth reflects new buying is genuinely contested. IMF spokesperson Julie Kozack has attributed the on-chain increase to consolidation across government-owned wallets, "notably from a BANDESAL cold-storage address," maintaining that total state-controlled holdings were unchanged. The ONBTC has continued to present the same movements as accumulation. Both accounts can be true of the same transactions, which is part of why the disagreement has proved durable.

Transparency also carried a technical cost, and in 2025 the office named it. A reused address publishes its public keys the moment it spends. On 29 August 2025, in block 912,321, a single transaction took 41 inputs from the published vault address and paid out fourteen fresh P2SH outputs: twelve of exactly 500 BTC, one of 282.68984412 BTC and one of 0.49303156 BTC, 6,283.18287568 BTC in all, for a fee of 21,337 satoshis. The ONBTC said the move aligned with best practice and "prepares for potential developments in quantum computing," reasoning that capping funds per address limits exposure because an unused address with only a hashed public key on chain stays protected. The dashboard was adapted to follow many addresses at once, keeping the audit trail while retiring address reuse.