The International Monetary Fund has released $139 million to El Salvador while granting a fresh waiver for a breach of the country’s limits on state bitcoin accumulation. The executive board completed the second and third reviews of the nation’s $1.4 billion Extended Fund Facility and cleared the payout for immediate release.
The fund said El Salvador failed a performance criterion that caps additional bitcoin purchases by the public sector. Program terms allow holdings to grow only through documented private donations. According to Bloomberg, the waiver was granted based on corrective measures and renewed policy commitments, and the IMF reaffirmed that further accumulation must stop.
How the breach built up
El Salvador holds somewhere between 7,500 and 7,800 BTC depending on the tracker, worth roughly $600 million or more at current prices near $85,000. The figure has grown well past the level that applied when the December 2024 program was agreed. The government bought about 1,090 BTC in a single November 2025 session as prices slid below $90,000, its largest daily purchase since adopting the currency. It also kept up a well-publicized one-BTC-per-day buying habit through 2026 and marked September’s Bitcoin Day with a symbolic 21 BTC purchase.
Every one of those transactions sat uneasily beside a facility whose documents set a zero ceiling on voluntary public-sector bitcoin buying. Negotiators have spent most of 2026 squaring that circle. In March the IMF formally asked El Salvador to halt accumulation through purchases and mining and to dismantle the public structures used to acquire the asset. President Nayib Bukele rejected that demand in public, saying the buying policy would continue regardless of outside pressure. Officials then tried to reconcile the two positions, arguing in earlier reviews that increases to the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve stayed consistent with conditionality because of how the National Bitcoin Office financed them.
Donations as the loophole
That argument reached its final form this week. To secure the waiver, El Salvador provided documentation showing that its most recent BTC additions came entirely from private donors rather than public funds, as reported by CryptoRank. The IMF accepted the account and released the money. The distinction matters to accountants more than to market observers, since the coins end up in the same state balance either way. What changes is which line of the program documents absorbs them.
The donation framing also shields officials from a political problem back home. Announcing that the state stopped buying bitcoin outright would read as surrender in a country where the currency’s adoption has become a core part of the government’s identity. Describing the same halt as a shift to private donations lets the daily-purchase messaging fade quietly without a formal reversal.
Chivo changes hands
The same review confirmed a structural change. Majority ownership and operational control of the Chivo wallet, the state-run payments app built after bitcoin became legal tender in 2021, has moved to a private operator. The buyer has not been named publicly, and the lack of disclosure has drawn comment from analysts who note that the government still holds the customer keys. Bukele publicly denied reports in September that the country’s bitcoin reserve itself had been handed off or managed by outside parties, saying only equity in the wallet company changed hands. The confusion was easy to create and hard to unwind: media coverage of the IMF review conflated a change of ownership at the wallet company with a transfer of the reserve, and the president pushed back on Cointelegraph and others before the fund clarified its language.
What the IMF still wants
The IMF said the waiver was granted “based on corrective measures and renewed policy commitments,” while reaffirming that further bitcoin accumulation must stop.
The remaining conditions are concrete. The fund asks for public audits of state bitcoin holdings, anti-money-laundering rules for digital asset service providers, and disclosure rules that make any future growth in the reserve easy to measure. Officials also want a winding down of state involvement in day-to-day crypto infrastructure, with the Chivo sale serving as the test case. Bitcoin’s legal tender status was already rolled back in a January reform, which removed its mandatory-acceptance character but left the reserve strategy and the National Bitcoin Office in place.
Why the waiver matters
The episode shows the shape of the deal the fund is willing to tolerate. Limits get breached, the flow of money pauses, and officials negotiate their way past the gap without unwinding the underlying policy. For other governments watching the dispute, the practical lesson is that the IMF will accommodate headline bitcoin exposure when the accounting stays transparent and the fiscal program holds. For critics, the sequence sets a pattern where rules bend after the fact and enforcement becomes a negotiating posture rather than a constraint.
The money itself is not small change for San Salvador. The $139 million tranche arrives as the country works through fiscal reforms the fund praised in its review, including improvements to tax collection and budget transparency. Bond yields on Salvadoran debt have eased since the program began, and the waiver removes the near-term risk that a formal noncompliance finding would freeze the remaining reviews and cut off further disbursements under the 40-month facility.
Both sides walk away with something. The fund keeps its conditionality on paper and a documented trail showing it pressed for compliance. El Salvador keeps its reserve, its donation pipeline, and a position currently showing unrealized gains after purchases at an average near $56,000. The next review, sometime in 2027, will test whether the accumulation freeze holds now that the cost of breaching it is known to be negotiable.