El Salvador’s bitcoin debut stumbles

El Salvador’s bitcoin debut stumbles

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El Salvador’s pioneering adoption of bitcoin as legal tender hit snags within hours of the launch on Tuesday after the government had to take its app for storing the volatile digital asset offline and the global price slumped.

Around dawn local time, President Nayib Bukele said on Twitter that the digital wallet app called “Chivo” — Salvadoran slang for cool — would stop working while server capacity was increased.

The app, which offers Salvadoran citizens who download it an initial $30 of free bitcoin, went back online a few hours later, with Bukele appearing to personally supervise the testing process via Twitter. So far the Chivo app is only available on the Huawei App Gallery, though the government wants to make it available via Apple and Google too.

The global price of bitcoin wobbled as the country’s wallet system crashed, falling as much as 17 per cent to $43,119 before recovering to trade 10 per cent lower. Coinbase, the US crypto exchange, encountered technical problems that delayed or cancelled some customers’ transactions.

Bukele took to Twitter to urge citizens to buy on the dip in prices. On Tuesday, he said