Bandesal Bank in El Salvador Won't Discuss BTC Activities

Bandesal – a traditional bank in the nation of El Salvador – is refusing to discuss with reporters how the country is spending its bitcoin funds. It will not provide any data regarding how the country is maintaining its bitcoin purchases, nor will it say where the money is going or how it’s being stored, claiming that data is “confidential.”

Bandesal in El Salvador Is Staying Quiet

The Anti-Corruption Legal Advisory Center (ALAC) is condemning the bank and El Salvador for not being transparent about their business dealings, claiming much of it has to do with the use of public funds. In a statement, the organization said:

The confidentiality limits the possibility for citizens to access and receive information on the operations carried out with public funds by Bandesal.

Some reports are claiming that the nation has lost as much as $60 million on BTC given that the world’s number one digital currency has fallen so much in the past year. There was a time (last November) when the currency was trading at a new all-time high of about $68,000 per unit, though things have come crashing down since then, and the currency is now trading in the low $20K range. That’s a loss of about 70 percent in its value, and many residents feel the nation’s bitcoin experiment was a failure.

If such losses have indeed been experienced by El Salvador, the nation is likely seeing a drop of about 90 percent in its overall GDP. However, resident Edgardo Acevedo believes the bitcoin dealings of the nation haven’t really affected the nation’s overall outcome, as he thinks the economy is moving at about the same pace as it was when bitcoin was first declared legal tender in El Salvador in September of last year. He said:

Economically, I can say that nothing has changed.

El Salvador has had somewhat of a rocky experience integrating bitcoin as a method of payment. The nation endured several barricades and resistance from organizations like the World Bank, which stated that it would not be aiding the region in its crypto agenda given bitcoin is vulnerable to price swings and thus too volatile to be taken seriously.

In addition, the Chivo wallet system the country is utilizing to store residents’ bitcoin units encountered several technical issues when it was first established. Many residents of El Salvador also protested what they felt was forced bitcoin usage and took to the streets of San Salvador – the capital of the Central American country – to riot and voice their opposition.

Lack of Bitcoin Use?

Discussing the Chivo wallet, NBER’s Laurent Belsie wrote the following in a recent report:

Just as most households using Chivo prefer to keep their money in cash rather than in bitcoin, 88 percent of firms convert their bitcoin into dollars.

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