After meeting with Salvadoran Ambassador Milena Mayorga in D.C., and then meeting with the Consular General in Miami, 10XTS is honored to be an invited guest to join a Presidential envoy this week to El Salvador to meet with various Ministries of Economic Development, Finance, Tourism, Banking, and the President of El Salvador, Nayib Bukele.

Under official state invitation, we were asked to visit to discuss various projects on their roadmap, including the potential tokenization of Salvadoran infrastructure projects for financing and trading through regulatory-compliant, tokenized capital markets.

The delegation is presently on the ground in El Salvador meeting yesterday and today with the government, and will spend Saturday on helicopter tours visiting infrastructure projects throughout the nation.

If you’ve been following along, you know that El Salvador declared Bitcoin a form of legal tender. The nation is intent to pursue a technology-progressive approach in reforming their economy to better the existence of the El Salvadoran people, who desperately need capital investment to stem the tide of expatriation out of the nation.

Last year, President Bukele appeared on Tucker Carlson to talk about the systemic problems that even compound into a U.S. immigration policy concern.

In addition to creating Bitcoin City using the geothermal energy created by the volcano, El Salvador has created a $1 billion Bitcoin-backed bond to further infrastructure investment and development. Apparently, another $5 billion in bonds are coming.

This has elicited a very less-than-favorable response from the IMF, and if you didn’t catch it, Fitch downgraded El Salvadoran paper to subterranean junk CCC rating this past week.

They really, really, really, really, really hate the Bitcoins.

On Wednesday, the politics between the U.S. FedGov and President Bukele bubbled over via Nayib’s Twitter feed and the media.

A bipartisan sponsorship out of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations introduced a bill called the “Accountability for Cryptocurrency in El Salvador” (ACES Act), legislation requiring a State Department report on El Salvador’s adoption of Bitcoin, a cryptocurrency, as legal tender and a plan to mitigate potential risks to the U.S. financial system.

In response, President Bukele took to Twitter calling them Boomers, and asserting Salvadoran sovereignty.

The Hill and Bloomberg picked up on the spat within minutes.

While the messaging is awash with AML, money laundering, cartel etc… etc… what’s interesting is Dr. Cassidy’s telling quote in the committee’s own press release: “If the United States wishes to combat money laundering and preserve the role of the dollar as a reserve currency of the world, we must tackle this issue head on.”

It seems that he spoke the truth in the end of that sentence – preserving the hegemony of the US Dollar.

I mean, I get it.

Completely.

Especially considering the apparent success of the e-yuan pilot at the Olympics. It beat Visa for volume of transactions.

Now for the good part…

As you know from hanging out with us here at 10XTS, Bitcoin and crypto is only part of the blockchain equation.

Traditional capital markets are also caught up the throes of digital transformation through the application of the same underlying blockchain technology. As a leader in the assets and securities tokenization space, our consistent, well-established, compliance-first approach has now been formally recognized as, at least in parallel, a viable option to the pure play Bitcoin approach by the El Salvadoran government.

By tokenizing the underlying infrastructure and financial capital stack, El Salvador can directly seek listing and trading on decentralized securities marketplaces globally to access retail capital markets.

It’s certainly an interesting vantage point for us as a very tiny participant in these historic proceedings. Who knows where these discussions will go, but the 10XTS team is honored to be asked to weigh in.