By
Temitope Olatunji
April 26th, 2024
So far, 56 transactions have been sent to El Salvador’s new wallet address, with a large amount being small value transfers.
Only a day after El Salvador announced the transfer of its Bitcoin reserve to a physically cold wallet, crypto traders have already flooded the wallet with satoshis, “rare sats”, cats, and ordinals.
El Salvador Creates a Physical Wallet
El Salvador’s President, Nayib Bukele took to the social media platform X to announce that the country has decided to transfer a large percentage of its Bitcoin to a cold wallet, and subsequently store the cold wallet in a physical vault within the country.
We've decided to transfer a big chunk of our #Bitcoin to a cold wallet, and store that cold wallet in a physical vault within our national territory.
You can call it our first #Bitcoin piggy bank 🇸🇻
It's not much, but it's honest work 😂 pic.twitter.com/dqzedykxT1
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) March 14, 2024
Recent data from Bitcoin explorer Mempool shows that the wallet now has a balance of 5,689.7 BTC or $388 million in dollar terms. Additionally, Ordiscan shows that the wallet contains at least 67 Ordinals, which include text inscriptions, images, a 3D “runestone”, BRC-20 tokens, and “Cypherpunk Manifesto”.
Furthermore, the wallet is reported to hold satoshi donations worth about $700, with quite a number of them labeled sats as “pizza” and “vintage”. Vintage sats refers to sats that were mined within the first 1000 Bitcoin blocks. On the other hand, Pizza sats originate from the 10,000 BTC popularly used by Laszlo Hanyecz, an early Bitcoin contributor to pay for two Papa John’s pepperoni pizzas in 2010.
So far, 56 transactions have been sent to El Salvador’s new wallet address, with a large amount being small value transfers. While the exact goal of the transfers to the cold wallet remains unknown, community members seem pleased with the transparency Nayib Bukele has shown regarding the country’s Bitcoin endeavors.
Things were not this solemn when El Salvador adopted BTC as a legal tender in September 2021. The country’s move at the time not only suffered from internal riots but also faced backlash from global agencies like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Both agencies warned of dire economic downturn if the BTC legal tender status was not reversed.
The agencies not only faulted the El Salvador plans, they threatened to halt funding was also issued at the time. While refusing to yield to these criticisms, El Salvador doubled down on its Bitcoin strategy, a venture that has largely paid off thus far.
The El Salvador Bitcoin Transactions
Per the varied on-chain data from explorers, the initial transfer of over 5,698 BTC reportedly came from different sources. As of March 13, a total of 1,129 BTC reported came from 3/5 multisig signatories or authorization. Additionally, about 4,000 BTC was transferred on March 14, a figure that marks the highest sent to the cold storage.
With the cold wallet sitting inside the National Territory, The El Salvador President highlighted how important it is to maintain honest work with both his citizens and Bitcoin enthusiasts around the world. While it remains unclear what the next steps for El Salvador are following this cold storage path, the FOMO in sending Ordinals donations might not fade off fast.