El Salvador's Bitcoin Reserve Survived Another IMF Review. Here's What the $138 Million Deal Actually Requires

On October 1, 2026, the International Monetary Fund’s Executive Board completed the second and third reviews of El Salvador’s $1.4 billion loan program and released an immediate disbursement of roughly $138 million — even though El Salvador had missed a loan condition specifically meant to stop its public Bitcoin reserve from growing. The IMF granted a waiver, accepting the government’s explanation that the extra coins came from private donations rather than public money, according to Cointelegraph and CryptoSlate.

If you’ve followed El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment since it became the first country to make Bitcoin legal tender back in September 2021, this is the latest — and in some ways strangest — chapter: a government that keeps adding to its Bitcoin stash while its biggest lender keeps writing waivers to look past it. Here’s what actually happened, why it’s not as contradictory as it sounds, and what’s still genuinely unresolved.

What the IMF Actually Approved on October 1, 2026

El Salvador’s loan is a 40-month Extended Fund Facility (EFF) worth about $1.4 billion in total access, with a staff-level agreement struck in late 2024 and formal board approval following in early 2025. Loan programs like this release money in tranches, each tied to a scheduled “review” where IMF staff check whether the country met a list of agreed targets — budget deficits, reserve levels, and in this unusual case, Bitcoin-specific conditions.

The October 1 action combined the second and third of those reviews into one board decision, unlocking SDR 101.96 million — about $138 million in IMF accounting currency — according to reporting cited by crypto.news and Securities.io. The IMF’s own assessment, per that coverage, credited stronger-than-expected economic activity and improved security conditions for the program staying on track.

Why El Salvador Technically Broke Its Own Loan Terms

Here’s the part that makes this newsworthy rather than routine: one of the program’s original performance criteria was meant to cap how much Bitcoin the public sector could accumulate going forward. That condition exists because the IMF has spent years uncomfortable with a sovereign government holding a volatile, non-interest-bearing asset as part of its reserves — a point IMF staff made explicitly as far back as 2022, when they first urged El Salvador to drop Bitcoin’s legal tender status entirely.

Despite that cap, El Salvador’s Bitcoin Office kept reporting a growing stash through 2025 and into 2026. The Block reported holdings around 6,111 BTC earlier in the program; by early October 2026, IntelliNews and Crypto Briefing put the total near 7,790-7,800 BTC, up from roughly 5,968 BTC at the end of 2024. On paper, that’s a missed target — the reserve grew, not shrank or held flat.

How the Waiver Actually Worked

The IMF’s resolution wasn’t to punish El Salvador or pull the loan — it was to grant what’s called a waiver of non-observance, a standard IMF tool for when a country misses a numerical target but the board judges the program is still broadly on track. In this case, the waiver rested on a specific factual claim: that the Bitcoin added since the cap took effect came from private donations and similar non-public sources, not from the government spending public money to buy more coins.

That distinction matters a lot for how you read the headline. “El Salvador kept buying Bitcoin despite its IMF deal” and “El Salvador’s reserve kept growing from donations while public purchases stopped” are very different stories, and outlets disagree on which one is accurate — some reporting through mid-2026 explicitly described continued “periodic purchases,” which the government disputes. The IMF’s October 1 waiver effectively sided with the government’s account for past non-compliance, while also stating, in language reported around this review, that it expects no further Bitcoin accumulation beyond documented donations from here forward. That’s a forward-looking commitment the next review will actually test.

What Changed With the Chivo Wallet

A second, less-discussed condition in the program concerns Chivo, the state-built Bitcoin wallet app El Salvador launched alongside the 2021 Bitcoin Law. Chivo was meant to make Bitcoin usable for everyday payments and came with a $30 sign-up bonus in BTC for citizens; it was also dogged for years by outages, security complaints, and low sustained usage.

As part of the IMF program, majority ownership and operational control of Chivo have been shifted from the state to a private operator — one of the concrete structural changes tied to this review, reported by multiple outlets covering the October 1 decision. The state is stepping back from directly running Bitcoin payment infrastructure even as it continues holding Bitcoin as a sovereign reserve asset. Those are two separate policy tracks that are easy to conflate: Chivo was about citizen payments; the reserve is a central-bank-adjacent holding, more like a treasury allocation than a means of payment.

El Salvador’s Bitcoin Policy, 2021 vs. 2026

	September 2021 (Bitcoin Law passed)	October 2026 (current IMF program)
Legal tender status	Mandatory — businesses required to accept BTC	Voluntary since January 2025; no mandatory acceptance
Government wallet (Chivo)	State-owned and operated	Majority ownership and operations moved to a private operator
Public Bitcoin purchases	Actively promoted by the government as policy	Nominally capped under the IMF deal; disputed whether purchases have fully stopped
Reserve size	0 BTC before the law	Roughly 7,790-7,800 BTC as of October 2026
IMF relationship	Open conflict; IMF urged repeal	$1.4B loan program with periodic reviews and waivers

Figures on exact reserve size and dollar value vary by source and by the day’s Bitcoin price — treat the numbers above as a snapshot, not a precise, continuously updated count.

The Bigger Picture: Why a Government Holding Bitcoin Is Different From a Company Doing It

El Salvador’s situation gets compared to corporate “Bitcoin treasury” strategies — companies that hold Bitcoin on their balance sheet as a reserve asset, a trend our explainer on MSCI’s removal of Bitcoin treasury companies from its indexes covers in more detail. The mechanics are similar: an entity accumulates Bitcoin and its reported net worth swings with the price. But a sovereign government answering to an international lender is a different animal than a public company answering to shareholders. El Salvador can’t simply decide Bitcoin was a bad idea and quietly offload the position without affecting a loan program tied to the country’s broader fiscal credibility — and the IMF, for its part, has to balance its standard concerns about volatile sovereign reserves against the practical reality that walking away from the program entirely would hurt a country it’s trying to help stabilize.

That tension is exactly why this keeps generating waiver-after-waiver headlines instead of a clean resolution. For context on just how much a reserve like this can swing in value over a matter of weeks, see our explainer on what actually moves Bitcoin’s price — the same leverage, liquidity, and macro forces that move a trader’s portfolio move a national treasury’s, just with more zeros and more diplomatic consequences attached.

What to Watch Next

The IMF has flagged that its next review will focus specifically on verifying Bitcoin balance documentation and the status of the Chivo wind-down — meaning the “no further accumulation beyond donations” commitment is about to get tested with actual numbers, not just statements. If the reserve keeps growing in a way that can’t be traced to documented donations, the next review becomes a much harder conversation than this one was.

This is also worth keeping in perspective as a policy story, not an investment signal. A government’s reserve strategy says nothing about whether buying Bitcoin is a good decision for an individual household, and volatility that barely registers against a $1.4 billion loan program can be ruinous for a personal portfolio. This article is not financial advice — if you’re weighing a Bitcoin purchase or sale of your own, that decision depends on your own risk tolerance and circumstances, not on what any government does with its treasury.