President Nayib Bukele stated that the implementation of the state Bitcoin wallet was too difficult just a week after Bitcoin (BTC) became legal cash in El Salvador. Although the wallet faced some challenges, it is almost fixed.
Due to continued troubles with the software, Chivo, El Salvador’s official Bitcoin wallet, has temporarily disabled new registrations and halted app downloads for new smartphone models, according to Bukele on Twitter late Monday.
“Both things will be enabled until there are no issues in the application,” the president said, adding that the Chivo team anticipates registrations and downloads to return in a few days.
“The Chivo wallet’s technological flaws have been fixed 95% of the time. It will be working at 100% in the next few days,” Bukele wrote. He stated that El Salvador’s 200 Bitcoin ATMs, as well as 50 Chivo-supported ATMs in the United States, are currently “excellent.”
Bukele went on to suggest that the Chivo wallet’s rocky launch was due to an early launch, saying:
“Launching everything in three months was too much of a challenge and we made mistakes, but we are already fixing them and hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans can already use Chivo with no issues.”
Since the app’s introduction last Tuesday, the Chivo wallet has accumulated a total of half a million users, according to the president.
El Salvador released its official Bitcoin wallet in collaboration with Bitso, a Mexican crypto exchange that described itself as Chivo’s “primary crypto service provider,” as previously reported.
Due to capacity errors, the wallet went unavailable for maintenance on launch day, causing serious issues. Despite Chivo’s quick efforts to resolve the difficulties, many users appear to have continued to have issues transacting or withdrawing money from Chivo, with some users stating that the app’s functioning was “near zero.”
