El Salvador President Wants To Make Bitcoin Legal Tender In The Country

The El Salvador President Nayib Bukele wants to make Bitcoin a legal tender in the country and become the first country to do it as we can see more in our latest bitcoin news.

El Salvador made a huge splash lately and especially in the bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami as president Nayib Bukele announced that he will propose a bill to congress to recognize BTC as a legal tender, right after there was strong applause from the crowd in Miami.

The announcement didn’t boost the price of BTC immediately which is now down by 6% over the past 24hours after Elon Musk tweeted a meme about his breakup with BTC. Bukele’s video however played during a talk by Jack Maller who is the founder of Strike, a crypto wallet built on the Lightning Network. Mallers said that he lived in El Salvador in the past and discovered that about 70% of the population there doesn’t have a bank account and that 20% of the country’s GDP came from remittances that are sent by migrants to their family members. Strike launched in the country and Mallers said that the app now has 20,000 new users signing up each day. He framed Bukele’s upcomign legislation and said it was another step in a partnership between Strike that will open an office in the country.

Mallers called the announcement a “shot heard round the world for bitcoin” while VC Tim Draper praised it as a brilliant move saying that investors will be on the next flight to the country. Caitlin Long from Avanti Bank and Trust also called it a historic day for bitcoin but predicted a “knockdown fight” for approval because recognizing BTC as a legal tender will give it the same status as foreign currencies by banks which is another level of legitimacy that most governments don’t want to see.

El Salvador is one of the few non-US nations that uses the US dollar as an official currency but the tensions have been increasing recently between the Central American country and the US over the recent shakeup of the justice system. Back in May, the US Agency for International Development said that it will redirect funding away from the state institutions and will give it to local human rights organizations.