TL;DR Brekdown
- El Salvador to use BTC profit for vetinary hospital.
- Country has made $4million profit on BTC investment during market surge.
- Crypto community criticizes Bukele for Bitcoin law.
Nayib Bukele, President of El Salvador, has said that the country will use profits from its Bitcoin holdings to build a veterinary hospital.
According to the president, the country’s Bitcoin Trust had a surplus of $4 million due to the surging price of the cryptocurrency. The Bitcoin Trust, which Congress authorized in August, with a balance of $150 million, now has a “surplus” of $4 million, Bukele said.
“So we decided to invest a part of that money in this: a veterinary hospital for our furry friends,” Bukele wrote on Twitter.
Bitcoin has surged by 16.7 percent in the past seven days and trade at $57,391 (CoinGecko) at the time of writing, its highest value since May.
The president said that the veterinary hospital would service for basic and emergency care as well as rehabilitation. He added that the pet hospital would be able to attend 384 consultations and 128 emergencies.
Crypto community criticizes El Salvador despite Bitcoin adoption
El Salvador is the first country in the world to use Bitcoin as legal tender. The law was the idea of Bukele and has been both praised and criticized.
Although progress has been made since the adoption as the government tries to integrate BTC into the everyday lives of Salvadorians, members of the crypto community are also criticizing Bukele for Bitcoin adoption.
Vitalik Buterin, the co-founder of Ethereum, the second-largest cryptocurrency by market cap, said on Friday that President Bukele “should not be praised by [the] crypto community.”
“This tactic of pushing BTC to millions of people in El Salvador at the same time with almost no attempt at prior education is reckless and risks a large number of innocent people getting hacked or scammed,” he wrote on Reddit.
Before Buterin, series of protests rocked the country as locals, many of whom are against the law, took to the street to voice their disdain for the Bitcoin law.
