The two loudest sentences ever written about El Salvador’s Bitcoin experiment were a bond and a city. A tokenized, billion-dollar volcano bond that would let a small sovereign raise money on Bitcoin’s rails, and a tax-advantaged, geothermal-powered Bitcoin City rising at the foot of a volcano. Both made headlines on five continents; both are, in mid-2026, still promises rather than facts. That gap is worth sitting with, because it is exactly the gap a prospective citizen needs to see clearly before wiring seven figures to a program that shares a press cycle with those two headlines. The Freedom Passport is real, in force, and issuing citizenship. The volcano bond has never been issued, and Bitcoin City has never broken ground. Holding both of those truths at once is the entire point of this entry.
The volcano bond: promised, enabled, unissued.
Start with the bond, because its story is the one most often told wrong. The instrument goes by several names: the Bono Volcán, the Bitcoin Bond, the EBB1, a proposed sovereign issuance of roughly $1 billion, tokenized and settled on Bitcoin infrastructure, with half the proceeds earmarked for Bitcoin purchases and half for energy and mining buildout. The idea was announced in 2021 alongside Bitcoin City, which it was meant to fund. What lifted it above a slide deck was a law. In January 2023, the Legislative Assembly passed the Ley de Emisión de Activos Digitales, the Digital Assets Issuance Law, which created the legal framework for tokenized public and private debt and stood up a dedicated regulator to supervise it. That law is the foundation. It is not the bond.
The bond itself cleared a separate, later gate. In December 2023, the specific volcano-bond issuance received regulatory approval, and officials signaled a launch in the first quarter of 2024. That launch never happened. As of mid-2026, the Bono Volcán has not been issued. It has not been sold, it has not been oversubscribed, and the widely repeated claim that it went to market and hit its target is simply not supported by anything on the public record. There is a tidy version of this story circulating online in which the bond priced and succeeded; ignore it. The honest description is narrower, and more useful: the enabling law exists and works, the specific bond was approved and then quietly deferred, and no citizen’s status depends on whether it is ever issued.
Bitcoin City: the announcement and the empty site.
The status of Bitcoin City in El Salvador in 2026 is easy to state, and it is the same shape as the bond’s: a loud announcement, and no groundbreaking. President Bukele unveiled the plan in November 2021, sited near the Conchagua volcano in the department of La Unión, at the country’s eastern edge. The pitch was coherent on paper: a circular, tax-advantaged city powered by geothermal energy drawn from the volcano, its public works funded by the volcano bond, its residents paying value-added tax and little else. Nearly five years on, there is no city. There has been no groundbreaking on Bitcoin City itself, and no construction of the thing the renderings promised.
Here is the distinction that matters, and that most coverage blurs. There is real infrastructure work underway in that same corner of the country. The Aeropuerto del Pacífico, the Airport of the Pacific, has been under construction near Conchagua since early 2025, and it is a genuine, funded, physical project. But the airport is not Bitcoin City. It is a regional airport that happens to sit in the same landscape the city was drawn onto. Conflating the two lets an observer claim Bitcoin City is being built when what is being built is an airport. We name the distinction deliberately, because the same discipline that separates an airport from a city is the discipline a buyer should apply to everything a program tells them. Bitcoin City, as of 2026, is an announced plan. It is not a place you can move to, buy property in, or plant a residence.
The second chapter: spectacle is not infrastructure.
It helps to read El Salvador’s Bitcoin era in two chapters. The first chapter was the spectacle: the legal-tender law, the volcano bond, Bitcoin City, the Chivo wallet, the conference-stage announcements that made a small country famous. Spectacle is not a slur here; it did real work, putting a small nation on every financial front page and drawing the attention that made a citizenship program conceivable in the first place. But spectacle is fragile by nature, because it lives on announcements, and announcements can be deferred, repealed, or quietly shelved.
The second chapter is the infrastructure: the institutions, reserves, and statutes that kept working after the cameras left. This is the less glamorous chapter, and it is the one a citizen actually stands on. The reframe this entry asks for is simple. Stop reading the flagships as the measure of the program’s health, and start reading them as what they are, the marketing that got built and the marketing that did not. Then look at what functions.
What actually functions today.
Three things are real, operating, and verifiable in 2026, and none of them made the front pages the way the bond and the city did.
First, the Bitcoin Office. El Salvador runs a cabinet-level national Bitcoin Office, the Oficina Nacional del Bitcoin, under Director Stacy Herbert. It is not a think tank or a press desk; it is the executive body that coordinates the country’s Bitcoin policy and, relevant to us, licenses the firms authorized to submit citizenship applications. It kept operating through every headline described above.
Second, the reserve. El Salvador holds a strategic Bitcoin reserve of roughly 7,700 BTC as a state asset, and it publishes its holdings for public inspection at bitcoin.gob.sv, verifiable on-chain rather than taken on trust. The figure moves, so treat any specific number, this one included, as something to confirm live at the moment you read it rather than a fixed constant. What matters is not a precise count on a given day; it is that the reserve is public, on-chain, and auditable by anyone, which is a materially different kind of claim than a press release. Note the honest version of it: the size of the reserve is public and verifiable, while assertions about a fixed daily buying cadence are the sort of detail worth checking against the chain rather than repeating.
Third, the legal framework. The Ley de Emisión de Activos Digitales, in force since January 2023, remains the country’s digital-asset law, supervised by the Comisión Nacional de Activos Digitales, the CNAD, the regulator that same law created. This is the exact statute that enabled the volcano bond. The bond went unissued; the framework and its regulator did not go anywhere. They govern digital-asset issuance in El Salvador today.
Why a citizen’s rights rest on neither flagship.
Now the payoff, and the reason this entry exists. A Freedom Passport holder’s rights and tax treatment do not depend on Bitcoin City being built or the volcano bond being issued. They rest on different instruments entirely.
Citizenship itself rests on two statutes: Legislative Decrees No. 918 and No. 286, which created and enabled the investor-naturalization track. What they grant is naturalization: full citizenship, permanent, hereditary, passable to your children, and friendly to holding your existing nationality alongside it. That grant is unaffected by the fate of any flagship project, because no flagship project is named in it.
The tax posture rests on statute too, not on a city that pays for itself. Its shape, what we call the Four Zeros, is this: 0% capital gains on Bitcoin, 0% income tax on Bitcoin for non-residents, 0% inheritance and wealth tax, and 0% value-added tax on Bitcoin itself, set against a standard 13% VAT on ordinary goods and services, in an economy dollarized since 2001. The privacy posture rests on the same kind of ground: El Salvador does not participate in the OECD Common Reporting Standard, the CRS, the automatic cross-border exchange of financial-account information that most of the world’s banking centers feed. That non-participation is a feature of the country’s standing arrangements, not of whether a bond ever prices.
The volcano bond was approved and never issued; Bitcoin City was announced and never built. Neither is load-bearing. What a citizen stands on is a decree, a reserve you can audit on-chain, and a tax code, all of which were there before the headlines and remain after them.
The 2025 repeal is the cleanest proof of the point. Effective 30 April 2025, under Decreto Legislativo No. 199 and in the context of the country’s Extended Fund Facility with the International Monetary Fund, El Salvador repealed Bitcoin’s status as legal tender. The US dollar is once again the sole legal tender, and accepting Bitcoin is now voluntary for a private business rather than mandatory. That was a real reversal of the single most famous headline of the whole era, and it touched none of the things a citizen relies on. The reserve stayed. The Bitcoin Office stayed. The digital-asset framework stayed. The citizenship program stayed. A buyer whose thesis rested on the legal-tender headline would have felt that repeal; a buyer whose thesis rested on the statute, the reserve, and the tax posture did not, because those were never the same thing.
The price, stated once.
Because this is a program that filters by price, the numbers belong on the page, not behind a form. The government contribution is $1,000,000, flat across a family, plus $999 for each additional applicant. Our advisory fee is a flat 5%, which is $50,000. The relationship starts with a $5,000 paid strategy engagement, credited in full toward that advisory fee if you proceed within 90 days. For a single applicant, the all-in figure is $1,050,000. The contribution settles on-chain, in Bitcoin or USDT, directly to the government’s wallet; our firm never custodies it. None of these numbers move with the volcano bond or Bitcoin City, in either direction.
The honest trade-offs.
Naming what the program is would be dishonest without naming what it is not. A Freedom Passport does not buy visa-free access to the United States or the United Kingdom; if that specific mobility is your goal, this is the wrong instrument, and we would rather say so now than after your contribution is committed. The contribution is non-refundable once a file is in motion, which is a real risk to weigh, not a footnote. And a second citizenship changes none of your obligations to your first: a US person still owes the Internal Revenue Service worldwide reporting and remains subject to FATCA, the Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act, regardless of any passport El Salvador grants. On mobility, the Salvadoran passport reaches 132 destinations and sits at roughly rank 36 on the Henley index, a real figure worth confirming at the moment you read it, and not one we will inflate. These are the trade-offs stated in the same breath as the strengths, because a program that lists only its strengths is selling something.
Alignment, not access.
This is why the downside a prospective citizen should actually model is not what if Bitcoin City never gets built. That question has already been answered, in a sense; it has not been built, and the citizenship works anyway. The real question is narrower, and more answerable: are the statute, the reserve, and the tax posture you are actually buying real, in force, and verifiable today? They are, and none of them are hostages to a flagship reaching completion.
We have said before that the price is the filter, and that what this program offers is alignment, not access. The people this is for are not buying a skyline that does not exist yet; they are buying a legal and monetary posture that already does. If that is the thing you want, the first step is not a brochure and not a sales call; it is a $5,000 paid strategy session, credited toward the work if you proceed. That fee is itself part of the filter. It sorts the people who want to build something durable from the people who wanted the headline.
This entry describes the statutory framework and the state of two announced projects as we understand them from published law and public program materials; it is not tax or legal advice. Confirm current statutory, program, and on-chain specifics, and how they apply to your own file, with a qualified Salvadoran immigration or tax advisor before acting.
Adam Juchniewicz, CEO, 21 CBI
The Ledger · July 2026