Invest3 publishers2 min readPublished Updated
IMF traces El Salvador's bitcoin growth since mid-2025 to private donations
The fund's staff-level agreement puts every coin added since the first review down to documented private donations with no public money used. That leaves the government's daily-purchase posts without a budget line behind them.
The Investor · Invest desk
What happened
- The IMF said on Thursday, alongside a staff-level agreement on El Salvador's combined second and third program reviews, that private donations account for the bitcoin added to the national reserve since mid-2025.
- Documentation supplied by Salvadoran authorities verified to the fund that accumulation since the first review reflects private donations and that no public resources were used.
- The government's own Bitcoin Office posted on August 28, 2026 that El Salvador had just bought more bitcoin, one BTC per day, every day.
- A year earlier, in September 2025, an IMF communications officer told Decrypt that the total quantity of government-owned bitcoin had not increased at all.
Compiled by The InvestorSomething wrong?How this is made
Why it matters
- contradiction Anyone pricing sovereign bitcoin demand has to choose between the issuing government's verb, bought, and the fund's, donated, and the two cannot describe the same transaction.
- constraint With the fund expecting no additions beyond the documented donations, the reserve's growth path depends on who gives rather than on a line item a finance ministry can scale up or fund with debt.
- precedent Treasuries treating El Salvador as a worked example lose the part they wanted, a state spending public money on coins, and keep only the part they already had, accepting and custodying gifts.
Size the flow that is in dispute. The window the fund describes opens in mid-2025 [1], and the government's Bitcoin Office was still posting the daily-purchase line on August 28, 2026 [4]; call the start July 1 and the span is 424 days [1], which at one coin a day is roughly 424 coins [2], or about 34.4 million dollars against the 81,249 dollar quote at the head of Decrypt's own price ticker [7][3]. Run it as a standing budget line instead and one coin a day annualises to about 29.7 million dollars [5]. That is the size of the appropriation that has been carried around as proof that sovereign treasuries will allocate to bitcoin. On the fund's account, that flow was private donations rather than a budgeted appropriation [2].
The phrase doing the work is "no public resources were used" [2], which answers which account paid rather than whether the wallet grew, and three descriptions of the same reserve are now on the record with only the issuing government's using the verb bought [4]. That gap matters more than the coin count, because a donation and a purchase leave identical on-chain balances and opposite fiscal signals. A sovereign bid is interesting to a market not for its volume but for its price insensitivity: a buyer with a mandate and a line item keeps bidding when the print falls, while a donor flow depends only on the donor's continued willingness to give.
The arithmetic runs the other way for El Salvador, which is the part the accumulation story never priced. A government that did not spend public money on coins [2] also did not forgo roughly 29.7 million dollars a year of anything else [5], so the fiscal-risk case against the reserve and the sovereign-demand case for it come apart at the same seam. Nothing in the fund's language describes a treasury choosing bitcoin over a road or a payroll.
The reading the evidence earns is narrow. There is no documented public purchase in the window, so the daily-buy line should not be priced as state balance-sheet demand, and the counter-position deserves its space: verification here runs through documentation the authorities supplied to the fund [2] rather than a published payment trail, and the fund's own account has already changed once [6]. A payment out of a public account would overturn the read; so would a fourth version of events, which on the record so far is not exotic. Until one of those arrives, what El Salvador has demonstrated is that a state can hold donated bitcoin - a narrower claim than a state choosing to buy it.
What to watch
- Whether Salvadoran authorities or the published staff report disclose the donation documentation, including who gave and when.
- Whether the Bitcoin Office keeps posting daily purchase claims now that the fund expects no further additions.
- Board sign-off on the combined second and third reviews, and whether the "no public resources" language survives into the published report.