El Salvador Denies Stablecoin Shift, Holds 7,790 Bitcoin (BTC) in Reserve

Denial From the National Bitcoin Office

El Salvador is not turning its back on Bitcoin (BTC), and the office that runs the country's crypto policy wants that on the record. The National Bitcoin Office (ONBTC) issued a public rebuttal on Wednesday, September 30, after days of reports claimed the country, nearly five years after it became the first state to make Bitcoin legal tender, was quietly pivoting to stablecoins. In a statement posted on X, the office said the government has “no plans to launch or operate any Bitcoin, cryptocurrency or stablecoin wallet.” With the recent sale of the state-built Chivo wallet to a private operator, it added, “all state-level involvement has formally ended.” The clarification lands while the Bitcoin (BTC) price holds in the low $84,000s, and it comes with a firm label: the earlier reports were, in the office's wording, fake news. The speculation was not invented from nothing. Skeptics and analysts had argued for months that Bitcoin never achieved broad daily use inside the country, that its dollarized economy left little room for a second unit of account, and that stablecoin issuer Tether's expanding market share was pulling governments toward fiat-backed digital assets. The Chivo sale and a new remittance product were read through that lens, as further signs of a retreat in the wider debate over sovereign Bitcoin adoption. ONBTC rejects the inference. Its position separates two things the reports had fused: the state exiting the wallet business, which is done, and the state changing its reserve strategy, which the office says has not happened. That distinction had already been drawn by President Nayib Bukele weeks earlier, when he denied that control of the country's strategic Bitcoin reserve was handed to a private operator and insisted only the Chivo wallet's shares were transferred, not the nation's holdings in its strategic Bitcoin reserve. Wednesday's statement, in effect, restates that boundary in writing.

Chivo Sale, Sivar App, and 7,790 Coins

Two developments fueled the stablecoin narrative the office now disputes. The first is Chivo itself, the government-built wallet that struggled for years with technical problems, weak adoption and public distrust of state-run financial software. By selling it to a private operator, the Bukele administration stepped out of direct management of the country's payment infrastructure and left operations to private firms. The second is Sivar, a remittance application launched in partnership with the firm Modveon, which runs on Base, Coinbase's Ethereum layer-2 network, and settles transfers in stablecoins. According to the official announcement, the app offers verified accounts, institutional-grade access, and a flat $2 fee for remittances from the United States to El Salvador regardless of amount. Neither product, in the office's framing, touches the reserve. Government data shows the state bought another 30 Bitcoin within the last 30 days, lifting the sovereign stash to 7,790 BTC, worth more than $652 million at recent prices below $84,000. A government winding down its Bitcoin program, the record suggests, does not keep buying through the same window in which the reports appeared. The accumulation pace reads less like active trading and more like a sovereign-scale hodl, and it places El Salvador inside a broader shift that Bitwise described in its recent report, in which sovereign wealth funds sold gold to buy Bitcoin. ONBTC underlined the point in a follow-up post on X, tying the wallet privatization explicitly to the end of state-level involvement rather than to any change in custody of the coins. As of the Wednesday statement, the accumulation program remains in force, the reserve figure stands at 7,790 BTC, and no successor policy has been announced.

$82K Support, 7,790 Coins Untouched

COINOTAG's proprietary 42-indicator composite S/R scoring engine rates the $87,396 resistance at 78/100, driven by the confluence of the Fibo 0.000 projection, the Donchian Upper band, the swing high and the Bollinger upper band, while the first meaningful support at $82,139 scores 70/100 on the ATR lower band, the 20-day EMA and S2. The trend reads as an uptrend with RSI at 63.30, though the MACD signal is bearish. Positioning leans long: funding sits at 0.0058%, open interest at $15.58 billion, and the long/short account ratio at 1.33 (57.1% long), with the Fear & Greed Index at 71, in greed. A daily close above $87,396 would extend the advance; losing $82,139 would invalidate the bullish read. Either way, El Salvador's 7,790 coins sit untouched.