Five years after El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender, the experiment has fallen short of its original promises for locals, but it’s been great for Bitcoin’s global profile.
It’s been five years since El Salvador became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender.
President Nayib Bukele announced the plan at the Bitcoin conference in Miami on June 5, 2021, to the jubilant cries and applause of the Bitcoin community, who hailed the tiny Central American nation as living proof that BTC could be sovereign money.
Bukele sold the experiment as a way to bank the unbanked, slash remittance costs, and attract investment to the impoverished nation.
But five years on, who did the experiment benefit, and what did it actually achieve?
Dr. Tobias Boos, a senior scientist at the University of Vienna who leads a research project examining the political economy of Bitcoin in El Salvador, tells Magazine:
Yet El Salvador’s Bitcoin bet undeniably changed the conversation around the world’s number-one cryptocurrency, and turned nation-state adoption from a theoretical possibility into a living, breathing reality. Whether it succeeded or failed depends on what you think El Salvador was trying to achieve.
In a video message played at Bitcoin 2021, Bukele said the adoption of Bitcoin would generate jobs in the short term and “help provide financial inclusion to thousands outside the formal economy.”
Today, the evidence for mass adoption is difficult to square with that ambition.
Research by Boos, Grigera and Schmid in 2025 found that the Salvadorans who adopted Bitcoin tended to be young, male, urban, more highly educated, and, perhaps more importantly, already banked. Boos concludes that, “Mass adoption by citizens did not occur.”
El Salvador had one of the region’s lowest levels of banking access at the time, with just 35.9% of people over 15 holding a bank account in 2021, according to World Bank data.
Account ownership at a financial institution (% of population ages 15+) - El Salvador. Source: World Bank
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