El Salvador has not directed taxpayer money toward additional bitcoin purchases since the first review of its IMF-backed loan program last June, according to the International Monetary Fund.
Officials in San Salvador instead supplied records showing that coins added after that review arrived as private gifts, not outlays from the national budget.
The finding was published on September 3, 2026, as part of a staff-level agreement covering the combined second and third reviews of El Salvador’s 40-month Extended Fund Facility.
The program, approved in early 2025, gives the country access to roughly $1.4 billion.
Board approval of the latest reviews, plus completion of agreed prior actions, would release about $140 million.
The statement resolves an apparent contradiction that had lingered for months.
After the first review, the Fund said public-sector bitcoin holdings were expected to stay flat.
Yet the government’s public tracker kept rising, including a large addition of more than 1,000 bitcoin announced in November 2025 and a pattern of one-coin daily inflows.
Earlier explanations from the Fund had described some of those movements as transfers among government-controlled wallets rather than fresh market buys.
The newest assessment treats the post-June 2025 increase as genuine growth, but attributes it to documented private donations rather than fiscal spending.
The IMF did not name the donors or publish a running total of gifted coins.
It did say both sides now expect no further accumulation beyond those already recorded contributions.
In parallel, majority ownership and day-to-day control of the state-linked Chivo e-wallet have been handed to a private operator.
The government kept a minority stake and custody duties for customer assets, while work continues on clearer reporting of bitcoin held across different wallets.
The same agreement also covers broader policy steps: tightening the legal and supervisory rules for digital assets and strengthening governance and risk controls for any crypto assets still sitting in the public sector.
Those measures sit alongside fiscal targets, including a higher primary surplus for the non-financial public sector and later pension-system changes.
El Salvador’s official holdings were reported near 7,764 bitcoin in early September 2026.
Because earlier coins were acquired at lower average prices, the position has shown substantial unrealized gains as the market price rose.
The IMF’s latest wording treats that existing stock as compatible with program rules so long as new coins are not bought with public money.
The staff-level deal still requires Executive Board approval.
If that hurdle is cleared, the next disbursement would add to earlier draws under the same facility. For now, the Fund’s public position is that El Salvador has complied with the core constraint on using official resources to buy more bitcoin since June 2025, even as the visible reserve has continued to grow through private channels.
