While it appears that El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele may be going off on a gloating tangent, he has clearly announced that the country has no plan to sell off its Bitcoin (BTC) holdings.
El Salvador Bitcoin Holdings Hits Massive Unrealized Profit
El Salvador has been in the Bitcoin market since September 2021 and at that time, the Central American country acquired only 700 Bitcoin.
Just like business intelligence and software company MicroStrategy, El Salvador under the leadership of Bukele, adopted a Bitcoin strategy. Without fail, the nation kept buying the leading cryptocurrency by market capitalization.
As of January, El Salvador’s Bitcoin holding had grown to 2,798 Bitcoin, a sum valued at approximately $130.5 million based on the price of the coin at the time. Unfortunately, the acquisition met with some skepticism and backlash from some entities including media personalities who believed that the country was getting involved in an unprofitable venture.
Bukele stated that these entities made it a point of duty to write about El Salvador’s supposed losses once the Bitcoin market price plunged.
When #Bitcoin’s market price was low, they wrote literally thousands of articles about our supposed losses.
Now that #Bitcoin’s market price is way up, if we were to sell, we would make a profit of over 40% (just from the market purchases), and our main source of BTC is now our…
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) February 28, 2024
Owing to its Bitcoin acquisition in November 2022, each of the BTC in the total holding was pegged at an average cost of $42,440. Compared to the current Bitcoin price of about $61,000, it is safe to say El Salvador has a huge margin of unrealized profit, up to the tune of $40 million. Bukele reiterated this position in his February 28 X post.
“Now that #Bitcoin’s market price is way up, if we were to sell, we would make a profit of over 40% (just from the market purchases), and our main source of BTC is now our citizenship program,” the El Salvador president highlighted.
El Salvador and MicroStrategy: No Plans to Sell
MicroStrategy is equally basking in the huge volume of profit that it has registered as a result of adopting the same Bitcoin strategy.
The Michael Saylor-led company has a portfolio of 193,000 Bitcoin, currently valued at over $11.7 billion according to the market price of Bitcoin at the moment.
Noteworthy, MicroStrategy’s Bitcoin holding was acquired for only $6.09 billion, thereby leaving the firm with a profit of around $5.7 billion. Apart from the huge profit registered, another characteristic that MicroStrategy shares with El Salvador is that none of them plans to sell their Bitcoin holdings, not even with the price of the coin eyeing a new all-time high.
