El Salvador's Bitcoin Office Denies Ditching Bitcoin After Coinbase Stablecoin Report
Bloomberg reported Tuesday that El Salvador is turning to stablecoins for remittances, five years after President Nayib Bukele made Bitcoin the country's legal tender. Within hours, the officials who actually run El Salvador's Bitcoin policy went on Simply Bitcoin Live to call the framing wrong.
BLOOMBERG SAYS BUKELE IS TURNING TO STABLECOINS
The Bloomberg story centers on Sivar, a new government-backed app built by the startup Modveon that lets Salvadorans send and hold digital dollars for remittances, settling transactions in stablecoins on Coinbase's Base network. Bloomberg framed the move as a reversal for a government that once bet on Bitcoin remaking how money moves through the economy.
The numbers behind the push are real. Salvadorans abroad sent roughly $9 billion home in 2025, with about 92% of that coming from the United States. Bloomberg cited a University of Central America survey finding that 92% of Salvadorans had not used Bitcoin as of 2024, and an IMF figure putting Bitcoin's share of remittances at just 1.75%.
WHAT SIVAR ACTUALLY DOES
Sivar charges a flat $2 fee per transfer regardless of the amount sent, a sharp discount against the percentage cuts traditional remittance services charge. Eligible US senders fund transfers with a debit card through Coinbase's on-ramp, each Sivar user gets a non-custodial wallet inside the app, and peer-to-peer transfers run on Coinbase's APIs before settling in stablecoins on Base. Recipients in El Salvador cash out at more than 1,000 locations nationwide. Modveon says more than 25,000 Salvadorans signed up before launch.
THE BITCOIN OFFICE CALLS IT MISLEADING
Stacy Herbert, director of El Salvador's National Bitcoin Office, and her husband Max Keiser joined the show to dispute the "giving up on Bitcoin" reading of the story. Herbert said the government has no plans to launch or manage any Bitcoin, crypto, or stablecoin wallet, that Sivar is a private-sector deal between Modveon and Coinbase touching a government community-development initiative rather than a shift in national Bitcoin policy, and that any change in that stance would be announced through the Bitcoin Office itself.
Herbert argued the confusion traces back to how attractive Bukele's brand has become. Nearly every crypto company wants to associate itself with "Bitcoin country," she said, and that pull can make an unrelated private product look like a government pivot once it lands in a headline.
THE RESERVE KEEPS GROWING REGARDLESS
Whatever the confusion over Sivar, El Salvador's sovereign Bitcoin position has not changed direction. The government's public bitcoin.gov.sv tracker showed roughly 7,789 BTC in holdings during the broadcast, continuing the buy-one-Bitcoin-a-day program the country has run for close to three years. Herbert drew a clear line between that treasury strategy, which she said remains untouched, and everyday payments infrastructure, where the government is comfortable letting the dollar and stablecoins do the work Bitcoin's volatility has made difficult for ordinary Salvadorans.
This story comes from the Simply Bitcoin Live show. Watch the full episode.
