El Salvador Bitcoin Office Celebrates 21 Months of Success and Sets the Stage for Renaissance 2.0

“Someone has to be the keeper and repeater of the vision. There is a ton of work to be done. When you have a thousand miles to go and you’ve only taken the first step, it seems like a long way. It really helps if someone says, “We’re one step closer, and the goal is not a mirage.” – Steve Jobs

Stacy Herbert, Director of the National Bitcoin Office (ONBTC) of the Office of the President of El Salvador, shared the quote above with me as I beamed with both pride and determination at the start of my interview with her.

It’s clear that Herbert is on a mission, one that began in 2010 when she and her partner, Max Keiser, first discovered Bitcoin and became some of its earliest spokespeople shortly after after. This mission now includes the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele, as well as the bureaucracy and citizens of El Salvador, which has become known as “Bitcoin Country” in Bitcoin circles.

By many criteria, the Bitcoin Bureau has already achieved a lot of success since its establishment in December 2022. It has 5,836 bitcoins stored on behalf of the country. Educated 80,000 Salvadoran civil servants about what Bitcoin is and why it is important. It has helped implement Bitcoin education from kindergarten to university level through programs such as Mi Primer Bitcoin and CUBO+. And it attracted entrepreneurs, investors and other bright minds to the country.

While Herbert is proud of these accomplishments, she is not one to rest on her laurels, especially as she believes El Salvador’s best days are still ahead. She has a vision that the continued adoption of Bitcoin in El Salvador will set the stage for a new renaissance, one that will elevate Salvadorans and continue to attract the world’s best to the country. Considering the obstacles he has overcome since he first arrived in the country three years ago, it’s hard to believe he won’t continue to do his part to make this new era for El Salvador happen.

Getting Started in El Salvador

Herbert arrived with Keiser in El Salvador towards the latter part of 2021, near the peak of the bitcoin market that same year. Euphoria gave way to despair in 2022, when the price of bitcoin fell in part as a result of the broader collapse in the crypto space.

“When we first got there three years ago, bitcoin hit $69,000 and then it dropped to something like $16,000,” Herbert told Bitcoin Magazine.

This left Herbert and Keizer with the challenge of explaining to Salvadorans that the collapse of major crypto companies did not mean that Bitcoin was dead, nor that it was a mirage.

“FTX crashed, BlockFi crashed and Celsius crashed,” Herbert explained. “When they saw all those crashes, they thought it was the same with Bitcoin — all these scams, all these frauds.”

Herbert reiterated the importance of leading El Salvador down a bitcoin-not-crypto path at that time.

“There were two ways: you could be crypto country or Bitcoin country,” Herbert said.

“With crypto country, you’re competing with Vegas; compete with Macau. The house always wins in those situations. And this is the same if you have a crypto economy. You have some rich guys running the house. The pre-miners, the chip owners, the chip distributors, they always win,” she added, stressing that she did not want to see El Salvador exploited by the crypto industry.

“Or you could go down the path of what Switzerland was to gold, or New York has become to the US Treasury. You could build capital markets. You could build an economy. You could build a Singapore 2.0, an Alexandria 2.0, a Florence 2.0. I pushed for this vision.”

Renaissance 2.0

In the vision Herbert shares with President Bukele and Keiser, a senior adviser to Bukele, El Salvador is in the early stages of ushering in one of the greatest eras of human flourishing the world has ever seen.

Like the Renaissance that took place in what is now northern Italy just over 500 years ago, El Salvador is setting the stage for its own explosion of entrepreneurship and creativity by adopting the hardest money ever known to man.

“Florence didn’t first have DaVinci and Michelangelo and Botticelli and all the architects, discoverers, explorers, astronomers and then find the perfect money,” Herbert explained.

“They found the perfect money of the time – the Florin – and that led to a positive feedback loop, concentrating more and more wealth in Florence over other city-states in what is now Italy and other regions of Europe.” she added, before sharing. that great artists, businessmen and thinkers flocked to Florence after it became a commercial center.

“We think the same kind of process could happen in El Salvador.”

Embracing Bukele’s vision

Herbert shared repeatedly in our discussion that the transformation of El Salvador could not have happened without the leadership of Bukele, whose approval rating among Salvadorans is still over 90%, making him one of the most popular presidents in the world .

A challenge for ONBTC now, she argues, is to get the rest of the country to see and embrace its vision.

“You can’t have President Bukele (believing in Bitcoin),” Herbert explained.

“You need at least some of his 80,000 officials to understand what he’s actually trying to achieve. Remember, as the keeper of the vision, we must bring everyone to understand President Bukele’s vision for El Salvador,” she added.

In efforts to get the rest of the country on board, Herbert hired well-known Bitcoin personalities to educate and train Bitcoin developers in Salvador, as well as members of the Salvadoran government.

This started with Bitcoin developer Jimmy Song coming to El Salvador in March 2022 (before ONBTC was officially established) to teach developers how to work on Bitcoin Core.

“Jimmy Song taught his Bitcoin course to seven Salvadorans,” Herbert recalled. “One of them was a guy named Mario Flamenco, who ended up being my assistant, number two in the Bitcoin office.”

Giacomo Zucco also joined not only to teach developers, but also provided three days of Bitcoin education to civil servants in El Salvador. Herbert explained that the educational efforts are not just about giving El Salvadoran bureaucrats deep technical knowledge about Bitcoin, but about reshaping their mindsets.

“It’s the people that interact with the population,” Herbert said of El Salvador’s civil servants, “so they have to understand why they’re Bitcoin country in terms of mentality.”

Herbert often referred to the importance of mindset during our discussion. She explained that the work ONBTC does is more than just helping people understand what Bitcoin is, it’s about preparing them mentally and emotionally to be great.

“To be extraordinary, (you have to have) people in government and in the population who are ready to be extraordinary,” she said.

“We are preparing a population to have the mindset to be Florence 2.0, to be Singapore 2.0 – to be something extraordinary,” she added.

“Everyone has to be on the same page about how important they are. What we do here is extraordinary. What President Bukele has delivered to the country is extraordinary.”

Passport programs

Through ONBTC, Bukele prepares Salvadorans for great things, while through El Salvador’s passport programs, he seeks to attract those who have a track record of doing great things.

On April 6, 2024, Bukele announced that El Salvador would issue 5,000 passports to scientists, doctors, and even philosophers.

We are offering 5,000 free passports (the equivalent of $5 billion in our passport program) to highly qualified scientists, engineers, doctors, artists and philosophers from abroad.

This represents less than 0.1% of our population, so granting them full citizen status, including…

— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) April 6, 2024

As Bukele said in his tweet, these 5,000 passports are technically worth $5 billion. El Salvador now issues passports almost instantly to those who make a $1 million investment in the country with either BTC or USDT.

Although this program was designed to attract top talent from abroad, it also had positive effects on the psychology of the Salvadoran people, according to Herbert.

“What we did with the million dollar price worked,” Herbert said.

“If you go back, the Salvadorans started saying, ‘My God, some people were paying $10,000 to coyotes to take them across the border into the U.S. and my passport is worth $1 million.’ Even if a thousand Salvadorans believe it, it changes the mindset enough that it is a critical seed of change,” she added.

What’s next for the Bitcoin Bureau?

Herbert said ONBTC has some big announcements coming up in the next three to four weeks. For now, however, ONBTC is focused on unveiling the first Bitcoin banks, which it believes will help El Salvador build capital markets.

“Bitcoin banks are going to come here and we’re going to get serious about building the capital markets that are needed — just like we’ve been building the foundations for greatness over the past 21 months,” Herbert said.

Beyond Bitcoin banks, Herbert seems confident that the sky’s the limit for what’s next for El Salvador. Thanks to ONBTC, the foundations were laid for the revitalization of the country.

“We have education, we have mentality, we have the rebrand – the biggest rebrand in history – as I call it for El Salvador, and we have a growing popularity for President Bukele, because he keeps winning,” she said. . “We have traveled a thousand miles in the last 21 months and now we have another thousand miles to go.”

Editor’s note: We normally profile startup founders for our Founders series, but this week we’ve chosen to profile the head of a government institution who has led those institutions since their inception.