Key Takeaways
- The President announced on Twitter that 32 central banks and 12 financial authorities will Meet In El Salvador on 16th May
- The meeting will involve discussions on digital economy, financial inclusion, banking the unbanked, El Salvador’s Bitcoin rollout and its benefits in the country.
El Salvador President Nayib Bukele took to Twitter to announce that 32 central banks and 12 financial authorities are meeting in the country to discuss Bitcoin(BTC). President Nayib Bukele announced late Sunday night on Twitter that 32 central banks and 12 financial authorities from 44 countries were going to meet on Monday, May 16, to discuss the digital economy, financial inclusion, banking the unbanked, El Salvador’s Bitcoin rollout and its benefits in the country.
The El Salvador president, in the follow-up tweets, further announced that the Central Bank of São Tomé and Príncipe, Directorate General of Treasury, Ministry of Finance and Budget, Madagascar, the Maldives Monetary Authority, Central Bank of the Republic of Guinea, Central Bank of Madagascar, Bank of the Republic of Haiti, the Bank of the Republic of Burundi, Central Bank of Eswatini and its Ministry of Finance, Central Bank of Jordan, Central Bank of Paraguay, National Bank of Angola, Bank of Ghana, Bank of Namibia, Bank of Uganda, Central Bank of The Gambia, National Committee of Banks and Seguros of Honduras, are among those that will be attending the meeting.
Bukele also noted that the Central Bank of El Salvador, National Bank of Rwanda, Nepal Rastra Bank, Sacco Societies Regulatory Authority, Kenya, State Bank of Pakistan, General Superintendency of Financial Entities of Costa Rica, Superintendence of the Popular and Solidarity Economy of Ecuador, will also be joining the meeting.
On May 13, the Bitcoin Beach Twitter account announced that “Central Bankers from Angola, Armenia, Costa Rica, Egypt, Gambia, Ghana, India, Namibia, Bangladesh, Burundi, Congo, Senegal, Sudan, Uganda, Zambia, and 25 other developing countries are getting on planes today to fly to El Salvador.” Soon after President Bukele’s official announcement about the meeting, Bitcoin Beach also tweeted out a map of the world that seemingly has countries who have either adopted BTC already and or are attending Monday’s meeting filled in with color, saying, “Probably nothing.”
The news comes at a time when the Central African Republic has adopted bitcoin as a legal tender. Amid one of the worst crashes in bitcoin history, El Salvador’s president, Nayib Bukele, recently doubled down on its bet, adding 500 tokens to the country’s national reserves. El Salvador’s association with BTC began in 2019 on Bitcoin Beach in the town of El Zonte.
Mike Peterson teamed up with a local resident named Jorge Valenzuela, to transform the small coastal town of El Zonte into a circular economy built around the cryptocurrency. Later, President Bukele announced his Bitcoin Law at a cryptocurrency conference in Miami in June last year. The law made El Salvador the first country in the world to accept BTC as legal tender and required businesses to accept it as payment. However, the adoption of cryptocurrency still remains patchy as people are skeptical about Bitcoin.
