El Salvador's President Bukele: El Salvador's Bitcoin Wallet "95% Repaired"

Just a week after bitcoin became legal tender in El Salvador, the country’s president, Nayib Bukele, admitted that the challenge of launching a national bitcoin wallet was too great.

Late Monday, Bukele tweeted that Chivo, El Salvador's official bitcoin wallet, has temporarily banned new user registrations and suspended app downloads for new smartphone models because of ongoing issues with the app.

“Both of these things will not resume until the app is free of errors,” the president noted, adding that the Chivo team expects registration and downloads to resume in a few days.

“The Chivo wallet technical bug is 95% fixed. It will be running at 100% for the next few days,” Bukele wrote, noting that El Salvador’s 200 bitcoin ATMs are currently “working flawlessly.” , there are also 50 Chivo-powered ATMs in the US.

Bukele went on to say that the rocky launch of the Chivo wallet was due to its early launch, saying:

“It was too much of a challenge to roll out all the features in three months, we made mistakes, but we are already fixing them, and hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans are already using Chivo without issue.”

According to the president, the Chivo wallet has amassed half a million users since the app launched last Tuesday.

As previously reported, El Salvador launched the official bitcoin wallet in partnership with Mexican cryptocurrency exchange Bitso, which describes itself as Chivo’s “core crypto service provider.” The wallet then encountered major issues on launch day and was taken offline for maintenance due to a capacity error. While Chivo quickly fixed the issues, many users apparently experienced issues transacting or withdrawing funds, with some claiming that the app had "almost zero" functionality.

Santiago Alvarado, director of cross-border payments at Bitso, declined to comment to Cointelegraph on the functionality of the Chivo wallet, saying that the exchange was “not at all involved in the front-end development of the Chivo wallet.”

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