Alejandro Zelaya, the minister of finance of El Salvador, reacted to the recent media attacks on the nation’s strategy of investing in Bitcoin (BTC) by calling the allegations of fiscal risks “extremely superficial.”
During a press conference held on Monday, Zelaya responded to a journalist’s question about the government’s reaction to Bitcoin’s sharp dip in an emotional manner:
“There is a clear criticism of Bitcoin as such, not of El Salvador’s strategy. El Salvador is what interests them the least, they [the media outlet] are not interested in what happens to our economy, they are not interested in what happens with our people, what happens with inflation.”
The official underscored the impropriety of allegations that around $40 million had been lost by the country’s budget because of the cryptocurrency rate drop since the highest point at which El Salvador has purchased its first potion for $60,300 per BTC in October 2021. Zelaya pointed to the hypothetical possibility of a BTC rebound:
“I have said it repeatedly: A supposed loss of 40 million dollars has not occurred because we have not sold the coins.”
Zelaya also rebuffed the assumptions about high fiscal risk as laughable and ignorant, while calling the risk “extremely minimal.”
At the moment, El Salvador holds 2,301 Bitcoin, which amounts to around $50 million by the press time. In fiat equivalent, that is less than half of the money the nation has invested in Bitcoin through its purchases in October 2021 and May 2022, when BTC was worth $30,700.
Like the whole crypto market at large, BTC has been declining since its all-time high in November 2021 (around $69,000) with the downtrend accelerating for the last month and a half following a series of the shake-ups such as the failure of Terra and the fiasco of a major DeFi lender, Celsius, as well as the global inflation rise.