El Salvador already has $500 million in verbal commitments for its billion-dollar 'meme' bitcoin bond — and $5 billion in more bonds could follow
- El Salvador has already gotten $500 million in verbal commitments for its bitcoin-backed bond.
- That's according to Blockstream, which is acting as a tech consultant on the bond, the Wall Street Journal reported.
El Salvador may already be halfway to raising its billion-dollar bitcoin bond, a Wall Street Journal report found.
Samson Mow of Blockstream, which is supporting the offering with blockchain technology, told the Journal the country has already gotten $500 million in verbal commitments for its bond. The Journal said it could not confirm the number, and a representative from Blockstream and El Salvador did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.
The bitcoin bond was announced in November, with half of the funds to be used for more bitcoin purchases and the other half for energy and bitcoin mining infrastructure.
But it has already gotten some pushback. Fitch, for example, said it was uncertain about the country's prospect at raising funds for the offering, which in part led to its decision to cut the country's credit rating further into junk earlier this month.
But the bond isn't necessarily about fundamentals, one financial executive in El Salvador told the Journal. He dubbed the offering a "meme" bond and said people are interested in the novelty of it. Mow said the country wouldn't have any problems raising the money for the bitcoin bond as crypto enthusiasts are excited about the opportunity.
El Salvador is even thinking about raising as much as $5 billion more in bitcoin-backed bonds in the future, the Journal reported.
El Salvador has been pushing into crypto, a movement driven in part by the country's millennial President Nayib Bukele, who has become known for trading bitcoin with government funds on his phone.
Last year, El Salvador made bitcoin a legal form of tender, forcing local businesses to accept the currency, and announced plans to create the world's first "Bitcoin City. The cryptocurrency is going to "change the world," Bukele said at a bitcoin event last year, according to the Journal.