US Senator Ted Cruz hails Central American nation El Salvador’s one-of-its-kind decision to use bitcoin as legal tender. By doing so, El Salvador became the first country to adopt the original cryptocurrency as its national currency on September 7, 2021.ย
Cruz, a Texas Republican, has been consistently voicing his support for the world’s most valuable cryptocurrency for the past many months. According to a recent financial disclosure, the Senator bought between $15,000 to $50,000 worth of Bitcoin during its dip in January. Bitcoin was trading around $36,000 to $37,000 during his acquisition, which further raised alarms of a “crypto winter”, given the crashing prices.ย
This episode came in stark contrast to last November when the volatile currency soared to the record high of $69,000. Since then, the digital currency has sprung back to its current value of $42,000.
In August 2021, Cruz, along with Tesla CEO Elon Musk, stood up against a crypto tax in the bipartisan Senate infrastructure bill, which sought to raise the revenue for as much as $28 billion to the Biden administration’s infrastructure package over the decade.
He later tweeted: “The infrastructure deal contains DANGEROUS provisions that would devastate crypto and blockchain innovation.”
In November, he proposed the inclusion of crypto as a mode of payment for the merchants and food vendors who served the Congress in Capitol Hill. In addition, the November 1 dated resolution called for the administrative managers to work on crypto-based contracts.