El Salvador's Bitcoin Wallet Taken Down On First Day

El Salvador's government had to pull its Bitcoin BTC/USD wallet off from the application stores after finding its servers could not manage all the users who flocked to the app.

What Happened: According to a Reuters report, Salvadorans trying to download the Chivo digital wallet could not find it on the app stores of Apple Inc AAPL, Alphabet Inc GOOGL GOOG and Huawei after the government temporarily pulled it off purportedly to upgrade its servers.

The interest in the application was presumably largely fueled by the country's president Nayib Bukele promising $30 of Bitcoin for each user for free — an interesting offer considering a recent survey that showed most citizens oppose the country's Bitcoin adoption.

Reuters reported Bukele at first reacted to the app's unavailability by an angry tweet blaming Apple, Google and Huawei for not releasing it. Soon thereafter, the president clarified the app was removed from the stores by the government in order to upgrade the server infrastructure to a degree sufficient to meet the demand.

Price Action: According to CoinMarketCap data, after starting up on Tuesday, Bitcoin's price fell down by over 10% compared to around 24 hours to press time and trades at about $46,705.20 as of Tuesday afternoon.

Photo by DrawKit Illustrations on Unsplash