From Yesterday's Simply Bitcoin Live | Episode 1602
The Numbers
Price held steady near the same level El Salvador's own treasury kept buying through today's stablecoin headlines.
The News
Bloomberg reported this morning that Nayib Bukele's government is turning to stablecoins because Bitcoin payments never caught on, five years after El Salvador made it legal tender. The story points to Sivar, a new government-backed app built by a company called Modveon, that lets Salvadorans send and hold digital dollars for remittances, settling every transfer in a stablecoin on Coinbase's Base network for a flat two dollar fee.
Stacy Herbert and Max Keiser, who run El Salvador's National Bitcoin Office, called into the show live to dispute it. Herbert said the government has no plans for any Bitcoin, crypto, or stablecoin wallet, that Sivar has nothing to do with Bitcoin policy, and that Bloomberg's framing was fake news. Modveon's own CEO told Bloomberg something similar: the treasury keeps stacking Bitcoin as a store of value, stablecoins just handle the money movement.
The treasury never stopped buying. Only the remittance rail changed.
Salvadorans abroad sent roughly $9 billion home in 2025, with about 92% of it coming from the US. An estimated 1.6 million Salvadorans depend on those payments, and the old wire system took a cut with every single transfer. Sivar charges two dollars flat, no matter the size.
Meanwhile, 92% of Salvadorans said they had not used Bitcoin at all in a 2024 university survey, and the IMF found only about 1.75% of remittances ever moved through crypto wallets. Reforms tied to a $1.4 billion IMF loan ended Bitcoin's mandatory status last year.
People don't want a philosophy. They want their money to show up.
The Culture
Guest SegmentHedge fund manager Chris Sullivan came back on the show still not buying the four year cycle. His case: everything since 2008 has been one continuous liquidity era, not four separate ones, thanks to a level of QE, ETF flows, and debt issuance the world had never seen before this cycle. He'd rather size Bitcoin against something real, like the S&P, than fixate on a calendar date.
He's watching 79 to 74 thousand as the pullback zone he wants to buy, with a worst case wick down toward 41,000. If the bull case plays out instead, his next leg up targets 170 to 190 thousand. His bigger point stands apart from either number: stop measuring in dollars and start measuring in how much Bitcoin you actually hold, because there are still fewer than a million left to ever get mined.
His read: this cycle doesn't end on a calendar. It ends when the supply runs out.
Opti gets Chris Sullivan to explain why the four year cycle already broke and exactly where he is buying the next dip.
Watch on YouTube →