El Salvador to make bitcoin legal tender: All you need to know

Bitcoin 2021 heralded the receding of the pandemic, with comfortingly familiar and mundane elements of a business conference: the branded plastic sunglasses, brightly colored sponsor booths, lanyards and panels. Some attendees wore business casual. Others looked ready for a music festival. One donned a furry rave bikini.

El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele said on June 5 that he would send a bill to Congress next week to make bitcoin legal tender in the country.

"In the short term this will generate jobs and help provide financial inclusion to thousands outside the formal economy," Bukele said in a video shown at the Bitcoin 2021 conference in Miami.

Strike, a mobile payments app that launched in El Salvador in March, said in a statement that it welcomed the legislation and was working with the country to make using bitcoin technology a success.

“This is the shot heard 'round the world for bitcoin," Strike founder and CEO Jack Mallers was quoted as saying at the Miami conference.

"Adopting a natively digital currency as legal tender provides El Salvador the most secure, efficient and globally integrated open payments network in the world," Mallers said.

Bukele took to Twitter to call promoting financial inclusion "a moral imperative" as well as path to growing El Salvador's economy by providing access to credit, savings, investment and secure transactions.

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