The author is routinely bearish and skeptical of El Salvador, but unlike other El Salvador bears he goes beyond Bukele quacks like a dictactor and is fairly explicit about where he's "reading between the lines."

It seems that the IMF has not been dispersing the loan, beyond the first immediate dispersal, because El Salvador is not meeting the requirements of the loan.

1st review1st review

On 26 February 2025, the IMF approved a new 40-month loan (EFF) equivalent to $1.4 billion to El Salvador. After a first, immediate disbursement of around $113 million under the loan, remaining loan disbursements would occur periodically following reviews by the IMF to confirm compliance with the EFF’s criteria and conditionality requirements. The first review concluded in June 2025 resulted in an additional disbursement of around $118 million.

2nd review2nd review

Following the first review of the EFF in June 2025, a second one was started in November but has not been completed. In IMF public lingo, the fact that a review is not completed is often reported as a “delay”. Upon completion, a staff level agreement would be prepared, agreed to with the government and then form the basis for submission to the IMF Board for approval.

While the first review stated progress being made with the Bitcoin project and Chivo in that “a new business plan to stop Chivo’s use of public funds and end public participation in Chivo by end-July 2025 was adopted and published (end-March 2025 SB)”, the requirement to sell or close Chivo by the end of July did not occur.

3rd review3rd review

The cause of the delay in the IMF’s 3rd review relates to the inability to audit and fully account for the Bitcoin supposedly bought and held by the public sector in the so called “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” and across other public sector entities plus the failure to audit or produce verifiable financial reports for Chivo.

Specifically, El Salvador must: “Liquidate the Bitcoin trust fund Fidebitcoin, publish Fidebitcoin and AAB Court of Accounts’ audits, publish Chivo’s financial statements audited by an independent auditor with experience in the crypto space, segregate and safeguard Chivo clients US dollars at the BCR, and end public participation in Chivo.”

The author concludes, rather cynically, that there's funny business going on with El Salvador's bitcoin holdings and services, which is why the IMF's loan dispersals are being delayed. They claim that the situation is unusual, which I can't verify.

We should all be skeptical of governments whether they like our favorite asset or not, but it's plausible that winding down some of these bitcoin operations are not as easy as they sound and there's no funny business going on at all (beyond the usual funny business of governments that is).