El Salvador Receives $138 Million IMF Disbursement After Bitcoin Waivers

The IMF's decision to grant waivers rather than halt the program signals that El Salvador's partial rollback of its Bitcoin legal-tender framework was sufficient to keep its $1.4 billion loan...

El Salvador has received a $138 million disbursement from the International Monetary Fund after the Fund granted waivers related to the country's Bitcoin policies, according to a report published by CoinTelegraph on October 3, 2026. The payment represents a tranche under El Salvador's existing IMF program, which the Fund approved in December 2024 for approximately $1.4 billion over 40 months.

The IMF confirmed the disbursement and stated that efforts will continue to reduce the state's involvement in Bitcoin-related activities and to strengthen crypto-asset regulation and governance, according to the same CoinTelegraph report. The Fund did not specify which performance criteria triggered the waivers, and that detail remains unknown. A formal IMF staff report or press release would ordinarily enumerate the specific conditions waived.

El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender in September 2021 under the Bitcoin Law, becoming the first country in the world to do so. The government under President Nayib Bukele subsequently built a state-operated digital wallet called Chivo and accumulated Bitcoin on the national balance sheet. The IMF repeatedly cited those policies as risk factors during its review cycles leading up to the December 2024 agreement.

As a condition of the 2024 loan arrangement, El Salvador agreed to remove the mandatory acceptance requirement for Bitcoin, effectively demoting it from legal-tender status in practice, while retaining permissive rules that allow voluntary Bitcoin use. The Salvadoran Legislative Assembly passed amendments to the Bitcoin Law in January 2025 reflecting those commitments, according to contemporaneous reporting by multiple financial news outlets.

The waivers granted in this disbursement cycle suggest El Salvador had not fully met every Bitcoin-related benchmark set by the IMF but that the Fund determined the deviations were not material enough to suspend the program. IMF programs routinely include waiver mechanisms for this purpose, governed by the Fund's Articles of Agreement and internal policies on conditionality.

For US investors and markets, the story carries relevance primarily through the sovereign debt channel. El Salvador has outstanding dollar-denominated bonds, known as Eurobonds, that trade in international markets and are held by US institutional investors. The continuation of IMF support generally reduces near-term default risk for those instruments, though bond pricing depends on a range of additional fiscal factors that the IMF has not fully disclosed in public statements to date.

The IMF's posture also sets a precedent that is being watched by other emerging-market governments that hold or are considering holding crypto assets on sovereign balance sheets. Countries including Bhutan and the Central African Republic have at various points adopted state-level Bitcoin policies. The El Salvador case represents the most documented instance of an IMF program being conditioned on crypto-policy adjustments.

The IMF statement that governance and regulation of crypto assets must be strengthened aligns with a broader multilateral push. The Financial Stability Board published a framework for crypto-asset regulation in 2023, and the Basel Committee on Banking Supervision finalized capital rules for bank crypto exposures effective January 2025. Those external standards now form part of the backdrop against which the IMF is assessing El Salvador's compliance trajectory.

What remains publicly unknown is the precise size of El Salvador's current Bitcoin treasury, the valuation method the government is applying to those holdings, and whether any further Bitcoin sales are planned as part of the IMF agreement. The IMF's next formal review of the program, which would produce a staff report disclosing those details, has not yet been scheduled publicly as of October 4, 2026.

The $138 million disbursement brings cumulative IMF payments under the current arrangement to a figure that has not been independently confirmed in full-program accounting by either the IMF or the Salvadoran government in publicly available statements as of the date of this article. The IMF's full disbursement schedule for the program remains available on the Fund's official website under the El Salvador country page.