El Salvador’s government is building a state-backed wallet with Modveon so Salvadorans can hold and send dollar-backed stablecoins, including remittances, on Coinbase’s Base network.
The project sits five years after El Salvador made Bitcoin legal tender in September 2021 and after the state-run Chivo wallet was wound down as a public operation.
What Has Been Said About the App
The report identifies three pieces:
- A government-backed application.
- Built with Modveon, a Palo Alto company that markets a “Verified Operating System” combining identity, payments, and public-service rails.
- Running on Base, Coinbase’s Ethereum Layer 2.
Modveon’s site lists payments and remittances among its product layers. It does not, on the pages reviewed for this story, publish an El Salvador contract, a Base contract address, or a live consumer app store listing for a national wallet.
A photograph circulated with the report shows a Modveon team at an event labelled the “First Sivar Community Gathering” in San Salvador on August 24. That documents a presence in the country. It does not by itself prove the wallet is in production.
Which dollar stablecoin the app will hold—USDC, another issuer, or a locally authorized coin—was not specified in the public material reviewed here.
Why Bitcoin Did Not Become Everyday Money
El Salvador’s Legislative Assembly passed the Bitcoin Law in June 2021. The statute took effect on September 7, 2021 and required businesses with the technical means to accept Bitcoin. The government launched Chivo and deposited a $30 Bitcoin incentive in new wallets.
On January 29, 2025 the Assembly amended that law. Private-sector acceptance became voluntary. Taxes could no longer be paid in Bitcoin. Those changes were part of El Salvador’s 40-month Extended Fund Facility with the International Monetary Fund.
The IMF’s September 3 staff-level agreement on the combined second and third reviews said majority ownership and operational control of the government’s e-wallet had been transferred to a private operator. The government kept a minority stake and custodial duties for customer assets. Staff said no public resources had been used to accumulate Bitcoin since the first review and that further accumulation beyond documented private donations was not expected.
President Bukele has separately denied that the sovereign Bitcoin reserve itself was handed to a private operator, arguing the IMF text referred to Chivo shares, not the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
Retail use is a different ledger. A Bitcoin Core contributor’s August account from El Zonte, together with national survey figures cited in that Crypto Times report, described payments as rare. The government tracker has continued to show a rising reserve.
Remittances Were the Original Pitch
Bukele sold legal tender in 2021 in part as a way to cut remittance fees. Remittances are a large share of El Salvador’s external income.
El Salvador’s Banco Central de Reserva has published splits in 2026 showing transfers received through crypto wallets remaining under 1% of total family remittances, even when the crypto-wallet line grew in dollar terms. In the first seven months of 2026, the central bank recorded $41.11 million through crypto wallets against $5.92 billion in total remittances, or about 0.69%. Those are BCR figures as published in the bank’s remittance releases.
A dollar-stablecoin rail on Base is an attempt to keep the remittance use case while dropping Bitcoin’s price swings from the payment leg. It is not evidence that the new app is live or that it will take share from banks and money-transfer firms, which still handle the bulk of the corridor.
What Is Not Yet on the Record
This story does not treat the wallet as launched. Missing from public primary documents reviewed today:
- a government or CNAD circular naming Modveon
- the stablecoin ticker and issuer
- whether the app is limited to Salvadoran ID holders
- how it sits beside CNAD-licensed private wallets already operating in the country
- any Base transaction hash or official contract
Modveon and the Government of El Salvador had not, at the time of writing, posted a matching joint statement on their official sites that this newsroom could use as a second primary. Coinbase had not posted a Base case study confirming a national deployment.
The reserve policy and the payments policy have already split. Bitcoin is being treated as a treasury holding under IMF constraints. The new work described on September 29 is a dollar token in a government-facing app. Those are different products.
Also Read: Bukele Denies El Salvador Handed $632M Bitcoin Reserve to Private Operator After IMF Review
