El Salvador stresses to IMF that both Bitcoin, dollars accepted

The Central American country’s finance minister assured the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that El Salvador has no plans to abandon the dollar.

El Salvador will not replace the United States dollar with Bitcoin as the legal tender, Finance Minister Alejandro Zelaya said on Wednesday, as the Central American nation sought technical assistance from the World Bank to implement Bitcoin regulation. This month, El Salvador became the first country to adopt Bitcoin as legal tender, with President Nayib Bukele touting the cryptocurrency’s potential as a remittance currency for Salvadorans overseas. El Salvador has been using the US dollar as legal tender for the past two decades after abandoning its own currency.