El Salvador to move forward with issuing Bitcoin bonds, said the Minister of Finance. The government will send about 20 bills to Congress to start its issuing.

In November, El Salvador announced a Bitcoin-backed bond and on Wednesday, the country's Minister of Finance Alejandro Zelaya said in an interview with local media that he was pushing bills to do so. He said the government will send about 20 bills to Congress to kick-start this process and they "provide legal structure and legal certainty to everyone who buys the Bitcoin bond."

The basic idea is that there will be $1 billion of bonds issued in 2022, half of which will be converted into Bitcoin and the other half will be used for infrastructure and Bitcoin mining, according to Decrypt. The government hopes the issuance will help to build Bitcoin City, a tax-free enclave for Bitcoin supporters in the east of the country, fueled by geothermal power from nearby volcanoes.

"We are the first country to release a Bitcoin bond. And because we are the first country to do this, it needs to be regulated," said Zelaya, adding that the government was drafting the appropriate legislation for the bonds to be released.

El Salvador became the first country in the world to make Bitcoin legal tender. El Salvador's Bitcoin bonds will be issued by Blockstream, a Bitcoin infrastructure company that has been helping the Lightning Network (a second-layer solution to help make Bitcoin transactions faster and cheaper) expand in the country.

© 2022, Eva Fox | Tesmanian. All rights reserved.

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