The crew doing the Bitcoin Bonds has been living it up in El Salvador, to great attention from the local press — people from iFinex, Samson Mow, Simon Dixon from BnkToTheFuture, and RT broadcaster and Bitcoin maximalist Max Keiser and his wife Stacy Herbert. [Elsalvador.com, in Spanish]

Max Keiser had suggested Bitcoin bonds to the government way back in June 2021. [El Faro, in Spanish]

Mow, Keiser and Herbert took a military helicopter, piloted by an El Salvador Air Force captain, to La Unión, the alleged future site of Bitcoin City. It doesn’t get much more libertarian than that. The local press coverage was not positive concerning the private partying on public funds. [Elsalvador.com, in Spanish]

Bukele brought companies in to work on the Bitcoin project based on whether they were politically reliable — without paying too much attention to competence.

The companies were mostly friends of Bukele’s long-standing “shadow cabinet,” who are associated with the Venezuelan opposition to Nicolás Maduro. Shadow cabinet leader Sara Hanna has advised Bukele since he was the mayor of Nuevo Cuscatlán, around 2012 to 2015. [El Faro, in Spanish; El Faro, in Spanish]

Hanna and cryptocurrency promoter Lorenzo Rey designed the Chivo network. Rey promoted the Dash altcoin for payments and remittances in Venezuela — though a lot of the Venezuelan merchants listed as accepting Dash couldn’t be verified as … existing at all. [George Donnelly]

A team from Cardano came to El Salvador in early 2020 to promote their minor altcoin ADA as a possible legal tender crypto, and negotiated up to mid-2021. Apparently, negotiations failed just a few weeks before Bukele’s big announcement about Bitcoin in June 2021 — and the whole project was scrapped.