El Salvador Pays Back $800M Maturing Bond, President Nayib Bukele Says
The country was the first in the world to use bitcoin as legal tender.
Jan 24, 2023 at 4:26 p.m. UTC
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El Salvador’s $800 million bond issue set to mature on Tuesday has been repaid with interest, President Nayib Bukele said on Twitter.
Finance Minister Alejandro Zelaya confirmed the same news on his Twitter account.
“In the past year, almost every legacy international news outlet said that because of our ‘bitcoin bet,’ El Salvador was going to default on its debt by January 2023 (since we had an 800 million dollar bond maturing today),” Bukele said. “Literally hundreds of articles."
Bukele noted that he’s only been able to find one article (from a Colombian newspaper) that’s published news of the repayment.
In 2021, El Salvador become the first country in the world to adopt bitcoin (BTC) as an official currency, and earlier this month, the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador approved a law that will serve as a legal framework for the issuance of the country’s long-delayed bitcoin-backed bond, also known as the Volcano Bond.
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Andrés Engler was a CoinDesk editor based in Argentina, where he covers the Latin American crypto ecosystem. He holds BTC and ETH.
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