This article is part of a four -piece series at El Salvador. You can find the previous shipment, a story about El Zonte, here.
There was formidable energy at this year’s Plan B conference in El Salvador.
The event, which took place on January 30-31, was historic to many of its 2,500 companions. It was the first Bitcoin forum in the Central American Nation to have a full double-language agenda that means sessions in both English and Spanish.
For Roman Martínez, a Salvadoran co-founder of Bitcoin Beach, Plan B was a dream because it allowed ordinary Salvadorans to make sense of their country’s bitcoin experiment and ponder their own place within it. “Until now, each Bitcoin conference was aimed at foreigners,” he told me the first day in Spanish. “Not everyone knows English. It is already difficult to learn a complex topic in your own language. In another, it is three times harder. “
Martínez was involved in arranging the event. The expectation, he said, was for maybe 100 to 150 Salvadorans would show up – but more than 1,500 tickets were sold to Spanish speakers. “I’ve never seen so many Salvadoran faces at a Bitcoin conference,” he said. “We arrive at a point where Salvadorans are aware that Bitcoin is not going anywhere, and either we are learning to become part of it right now or we are left behind.”
I could feel it too.
The English-speaking area, located at Sheraton Presorte San Salvador Hotel, had crypto celebrities on stage including Tether CEO Paolo Ardoino and also as Samson Mow, Jimmy Song, Blockstream CEO Adam and the early Bitcoin developer Peter Todd. “We are witnessing a struggle between centralized and decentralized systems!” Walker America, hosting the Bitcoin podcast, shouting at the conference’s opening panel.
Still, that side of the conference felt somewhat formal compared to the Spanish -speaking zone held at the Museum of Arts of El Salvador, which was absolutely electric. Over there, Salvadorans from all stripes outlined plans to help their country develop – from providing new educational opportunities, to mixing Bitcoin with dental care to discuss the government’s strategy with the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Many of the panel speakers, young Salvadorans themselves, had fire in their eyes.
“We are in the right place in the world at the right time in history,” Gerardo Linares, co -founder of Bitcoin Berlín (the initiative behind the country’s second Bitcoin Circular Economy) told a completely enchanted audience. “It all happens right here in El Salvador.”
A conference for Salvadorans
I was hit by the Demographic Makeup of the Spanish Area. Crypto conferences are famous male -dominated; Participants often complain about having to navigate a sea of dudes. The English-speaking zone was such-mayor 90% male and 10% female.
The Spanish side was much more balanced with a relationship of about 60% men and 40% women. While the majority of companions were sporting black and orange bitcoin t-shirts, you also saw middle-aged Salvadoran couples wearing elegant Salvadoran clothing and twenty-something college students with turtle and notepad.
I asked Evelyn Lemus and Patricia Rosales, two of the Salvadorans who led the Bitcoin initiative in Berlín what they thought of the female participation rate. They didn’t seem surprised. “There is a new generation of Salvadoran women who are not dependent on men,” Rosales, a single mother herself, told me. “
In El Salvador, most of the time, it is women who manage family financing, ”Lemus said. “That’s why they come to events like this: seeing how they can handle and invest family money. That’s one of the reasons we really wanted to have the conference in Spanish. “
Bitcoin should not be reserved for the nation’s elite, but should make everyday life easier for ordinary Salvadorans, Lemus said. This concern affected her action plan for Bitcoin Berlín. “We wanted to push back on this notion that Salvadorans do not use Bitcoin – which only expatriates use it. Now, if you go to Berlín, you see working classmen using Bitcoin. “
Giving sense of El Salvador’s situation
There was an overall feeling that El Salvador is at the forefront of getting into a new phase in his Bitcoin experiment.
The last four years have seen the Central American nation, once known as the world’s murder capital, redirects itself in the Bitcoin country. President Nayib Bukele, by locking MS-13 and Barrio 18 and putting an end to Warfare, had given El Salvador once in a life the opportunity to reorganize himself and achieve prosperity-in the least is the conference so to To see it.
A lot of conversations were about the pick-up in the Bitcoin adoption. Despite Bitcoin being a legal bid in 2021, you could only pay for things with cryptocurrency in El Zonte, The Little Surfingsby also known as Bitcoin Beach. By 2023, 88% of Salvadorans did not use the digital coin, according to a study by the Central American University.
But now another Bitcoin circular economy has been implemented in the city of Berlín, up the mountains, and other initiatives are reportedly growing elsewhere, as in Santa Ana, the second largest city in the country.
Martínez, Lemus and Linares were all eager to share tips and advice. The secret sauce for adoption, they said, is to mix Bitcoin initiatives with social work. “If the way to get people to use Bitcoin was to produce hamburgers instead of doing social work, I would do hamburgers,” Linares told me. “No matter what works. People like social things so that’s what we’re doing. “
Stablecoin Giant Tether’s decision to move his headquarters to El Salvador was also perceived as a massive victory. Tether reported $ 143.7 billion in assets, including $ 94.5 billion in government bonds, in the last financial quarter of 2024. In comparison, El Salvador’s GDP was estimated at $ 34 billion in 2023 of the World Bank.
Tether has become the largest company (far) that must be based in El Salvador – and other cryptic companies are bound to follow in its footsteps and take advantage of the nation’s advanced crypto regulatory framework and increasingly skilled workforce. For Salvadorans, this means more career opportunities, higher wages and the possibility that the country can become a technical hub in itself.
“El Salvador should not only be known to be the first to implement Bitcoin as a legal bid,” said Darvin Otero, CEO of Tiiananki Technology, on stage. “Let’s change the lives of young people here and create the next leaders of this tech movement.”
“We have a small territory, but we can have a big dream,” said Alejandro Muñoz, a Salvadoran lawyer. “We can provide a great service. … Good lawyers will attract good investors and filter out the scammers. Bitcoin training must be done in the legal industry; Steps are already taken in that direction. “
Light future in the future
The conference took place only days after the government, as part of a recent multi-billion dollar agreement with the IMF, resigned Bitcoin’s status as a legal tender-what means that companies are not obliged to accept Bitcoin payments anymore. While some members of the Bitcoin community have accused Bukele of hole in the IMF, none of the Salvadorans in Plan B seemed to see it that way. In their view, nothing has changed at a practical level as the vast majority of companies did not use Bitcoin to begin with.
In fact, a number of people welcomed the deal. “El Salvador locked in long -term financing to end the necessary reforms,” Mike Peterson, an American posting that lives in El Zonte and co -founded by Bitcoin Beach posted on X recently. “The IMF loan puts the country on the field to get the BBB credit assessment that most sovereign wealth funds need to invest in a country.”
That’s the big difference between Salvadorans and Bitcoiners. Hardcore Bitcoiners prioritize global adoption; They want cryptocurrency to eventually replace government -issued currencies, like the US dollar. For them, El Salvador is a springboard, the first nation that initiated hyperbitcoinization, but certainly not the last.
Salvadorans do not have the same priorities. For them, Bitcoin is simply a tool, a means of ending. Their goal is to develop Salvadoran communities.
“Salvadoran has always been proud to be Salvadoran. But there was a lot of pessimism. We were never the first in something positive, only in negative things, ”Linares told me. “Now people come from all parts of the world to listen to what we have to say. Bitcoin has a lot to do with it. ”
“There are many projects here in El Salvador that invest so much time and resources and get almost nothing in return – except enormous pride in being able to give back to society and support everyone else. This feeling has to expand throughout the country. We are in a moment of great change. You can feel it in the air. “
