El Salvador president gets hands-on to fix bitcoin wallet roll-out woes

September 8, 2021

By Nelson Renteria

SAN SALVADOR (Reuters) -El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele stepped in on Wednesday to closely manage the fraught roll-out of a payments app that underpins the nation’s adoption of bitcoin as legal tender, and called on users to report any problems on his Twitter feed.

Adopting language similar to IT departments in offices around the world, Bukele asked users to close and restart the app if a “currently under maintenance” error screen appeared.

The historic adoption of bitcoin as legal tender by the Central American country has been beset by teething problems that have contributed to a rout in the value of the digital currency globally https://ift.tt/3n8WHJ8.

Bitcoin continued to lose ground on Wednesday, trading down by more than 1.7% to about $46,000 at 1600 GMT.

That has not stopped some bullish forecasts about its future, with a new cryptocurrency research team at Standard Chartered predicting bitcoin will hit $100,000 https://ift.tt/3l8VheO by early next year and could be worth as much as $175,000 longer-term.

Bukele has sent a stream of Twitter messages over the past 36 hours instructing users on how to download the government-backed Chivo app which promises commission-free transactions and which his administration hopes will be adopted by the unbanked.

Overnight the president said the app, a digital wallet, was being disconnected for the second time to “improve user experience and the problems it had during the day.”

“We hope that tomorrow will be much better,” he wrote in a tweet.

Several users replied in his comments section to report ongoing installation problems.

Notwithstanding the technical issues, the app’s roll-out appears to have created a buzz in El Salvador, in part due to a government handout of $30 in bitcoin to every local user who signs up, and despite polls that show many people are wary of bitcoin’s volatility.

On the El Salvador edition of Apple’s App Store, Chivo was the No. 1 downloaded financial app on Wednesday.

Bukele earlier said only a few phone models would initially have access to the app on Alphabet’s Google Pay to avoid a rush that could collapse the system.

Reuters could not immediately determine how many times the app had been downloaded.

Global retailers operating in El Salvador were accepting bitcoin at some stores, including McDonald’s Corp and Starbucks Corp, along with several local outlets.

Bukele, 40, who is doing well in opinion polls but has been accused of eroding democracy https://ift.tt/3tjkZ40, is a heavy user of social media to govern and engage with the population.

(Reporting by Nelson Renteria in San Salvador; Writing by Frank Jack Daniel; Editing by Rosalba O’Brien)

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