At the time of writing this, Bitcoin is officially legal tender in El Salvador. The official wallet, Chivo, is not yet available in any of the app stores, though, it should have been available Apple, Google and Huawei platforms.
Ahead of the event, El Salvador bought 400 Bitcoin, publicly, in two installments.
The total amount, in USD, should be around $20.5 millions, which is just a percentage of what El Salvador needs to airdrop. I expect they will buy more in the coming days. Or, they may already have some more in the treasury, we can't know that, there is no law forcing a country to declare its Bitcoin holdings. That might be just the beginning of something like this. I know for sure there are countries holding BTC in various state institutions, but all of it it's from confiscations. As far as I know, El Salvador is the first country to hold it in its balances, publicly.
As of now, it seems there's a lot of enthusiasm, specifically from prominent crypto players. Binance didn't take long to congratulate Nayib Bukele, El Salvador President for this move.
Price rose slightly, Bitcoin is changing hands at around $52,287, a little under $1,000 since yesterday.
The only concern now is the bureaucratic process, including the release of the Chivo wallet by the app stores.
Ironically, in order to use such a great technology like Bitcoin, you need to rely on an entire supply chain. So far, the weaker link seems to be another piece of tech, namely centralized app stores.
As the story develops, I will try to come up with the most important parts of it.
We live in incredible times!