El Salvador’s Bukele says Bitcoin buys will continue amid IMF pressure

El Salvador President Nayib Bukele said his government won’t stop buying Bitcoin despite a new request from the International Monetary Fund to stop.

The IMF issued a new request on March 3 for an extended arrangement under its $1.4 billion fund facility to El Salvador, which called on the country’s public sector to stop voluntarily accumulating Bitcoin (BTC).

“No, it’s not stopping,” Bukele said in a March 4 X post, confirming El Salvador wouldn’t comply with the IMF’s request.

“If it didn’t stop when the world ostracized us and most ‘bitcoiners’ abandoned us, it won’t stop now, and it won’t stop in the future,” he added.

El Salvador continued its purchase of at least one Bitcoin per day on March 4 as part of the Central American country’s treasury strategy.

The IMF’s March 3 memorandum also requested El Salvador to stop Bitcoin mining activities and to restrict public sector issuance of debt or tokenized instruments that are denominated or indexed in Bitcoin.

While Bukele made it clear that El Salvador will continue stacking Bitcoin, it isn’t clear whether the country would comply with other requests.

El Salvador’s National Bitcoin Office did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Related: Bitcoin, crypto firms move to El Salvador, but success rides on banking access

The country initially secured a $1.4 billion funding deal from the IMF in December 2024 in exchange for scaling back its Bitcoin-related initiatives, among other things.

Some of those measures included making Bitcoin payments voluntarily and making tax payments in US dollars.

El Salvador currently holds 6,101 Bitcoin worth $534.5 million, according to data from The National Bitcoin Office of El Salvador.

The country has the sixth-largest Bitcoin stash of any nation-state, trailing only the US, China, the UK, Ukraine and Bhutan, BitBo’s Bitcoin Treasuries data shows.

El Salvador started purchasing Bitcoin in September 2021, when Bitcoin was made legal tender — making it the first country to do so.

Bitcoin’s status as legal tender was narrowed in January when El Salvador passed a law in January to make BTC acceptance voluntary for private sector merchants.

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