BITCOIN ATMs ARE READY TO SHIP TO EL SALVADOR

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Mallers, the founder of a Bitcoin money-transfer startup called Strike, swiftly maneuvers from inflation and the farce of the Federal Reserve to deliver the real subject at hand: financial injustice in the developing world. In El Salvador, he says, a country that two decades ago abandoned its own currency for the U.S. dollar, 70% of the population is unbanked and many get their income through remittances saddled with outrageous fees. Where, as he tells it, people are left with little choice but to flee their homeland, resorting to crime and violence. “But if you rewind those steps,” Mallers says, “if you can fix the money—you can fix the world.”

Now come the tears. Mallers, his voice cracking, explains that that’s why he moved to a little town in El Salvador for three months, to help these people while also launching his company there. “I talked to the kids,” he says, flashing photos of himself with young Salvadorans on the oversize screen. “I told them, ‘Man, we got this. Bitcoin’s here. We got this.’ ”

By the time he gets to the part about El Salvador’s president asking him to help write the bill that would turn Bitcoin into legal tender—teeing up a video from President Nayib Bukele making the announcement—Mallers is practically weeping. Then he rips off his hoodie to reveal a Salvadoran soccer jersey gifted to him by the politician himself. The crowd goes wild.

The Bitcoinification of El Salvador has been under way for a while now. Bukele had been tinkering with the cryptocurrency even before winning office in 2019. The millennial politician and members of his Nuevas Ideas political party have owned Bitcoin for years, according to two people in the government who didn’t want to be quoted commenting on the president’s finances. Bukele even hinted at his desire to adopt the cryptocurrency in 2017, when he was San Salvador’s mayor, tweeting, “we will use Bitcoin.”

The best place to see where El Salvador is going with all this is El Zonte, a surfing village on the country’s Pacific coast. In 2019, a small team of Salvadoran volunteers and an American expat started to transform the local economy to run on Bitcoin. Workers now receive their salaries and pay bills in Bitcoin, tourists can buy pupusas with a special Bitcoin payment app, and community projects are financed with Bitcoin donations. According to Jorge Valenzuela, an upbeat 32-year-old surfing aficionado who leads the volunteers, “it has changed my town.”

In early May, a month before Bukele made the announcement, I spent four days in El Zonte. To get there from the two-lane highway that snakes along El Salvador’s Pacific coast, you take a rutted-out road past corrugated-metal fencing and street dogs sleeping under mango trees. You’ll see the black, volcanic sand beach, rolling waves, and a point break that has turned this town of 3,000 into a destination for foreigners with surfboards. But the most striking thing these days is the orange “B”—the international symbol for Bitcoin—splashed on garbage cans, near the entrance of the dirt-floor pizza joint, and hanging on the wall near the surf shack at the beachfront hotel. The town has never had a bank. Now the lone ATM buys and sells Bitcoin