El Salvador Fortifies Bitcoin Treasury: Splits Holdings Across 14 New Wallets for Enhanced Security

El Salvador just executed a major security upgrade for its national Bitcoin reserves.

Security Overhaul: Why 14 Wallets?

The move splits the country's Bitcoin holdings into 14 separate wallets—diversifying storage and reducing single-point vulnerability. No official figures released, but the strategy mirrors best practices from institutional crypto custodians.

Nayib Bukele’s Bitcoin Bet Gets Smarter

This isn’t just about safekeeping—it’s about signaling maturity in sovereign crypto management. While critics still harp about volatility, El Salvador keeps building infrastructure that even Wall Street hedgies would envy.

Because nothing says 'financial innovation' like watching a nation outpace legacy banks with a few cold wallets and a vision. Maybe the IMF should take notes—if they can stop worrying about bond yields for five minutes.

El Salvador announces plans to split its Bitcoin into new wallets

According to El Salvador, quantum computers, in theory, can break public-private key cryptography using Shor’s algorithm. The cryptography serves many other systems, including banking, email, and communication. “When a bitcoin transaction is signed and broadcast, the public key becomes visible on the blockchain, potentially exposing the address to quantum attacks that could discover private keys and redirect funds before the transaction confirms,” the Bitcoin Office added.

The reserve is now being redistributed into multiple addresses, with each holding about 500 BTC. This way, El Salvador limits funds in each address that may potentially be exposed to quantum threats. The country had previously used a single address for transparency, exposing its wallet’s public keys continuously, which meant giving any quantum attacker the needed time to discover its private keys. However, the country is expected to use a public dashboard managed by The Bitcoin Office to monitor multiple addresses, allowing the reserve to maintain transparency without reusing addresses and increasing security.

According to records, more than 6 million BTC, which is worth around $650 billion in today’s market, could be at risk if quantum computers become powerful enough to crack elliptic curve cryptography (ECC) keys, according to quantum research firm Project Eleven. El Salvador has always held its 6,274 BTC (presently worth around $678 million) in a single wallet, but has diversified them into 14 new addresses.

Crypto experts dispel quantum computing threats

While industry experts have hailed the recent moves undertaken by El Salvador, Project Eleven mentioned in its April report that quantum computing is still very far from gaining the capability to hack Bitcoin. A Bitcoin private key contains 256-bits, and as presently no quantum computer running Shor’s algorithm has gained the capability to crack a 3-bit key yet.

Michael Saylor, the architect behind Strategy’s MOVE towards Bitcoin, also dismissed the threat, noting in June that the quantum computing threat to the leading digital asset is mere hype. He added that if it ever became an issue worth devoting attention to, the protocol’s core developers and hardware creators will implement fixes for it. “The answer is: Bitcoin network hardware upgrade, Bitcoin network software upgrade, just like [how] Microsoft, Google, the US government upgrade,” he said.

Meanwhile, El Salvador remains embroiled in its drama with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) after the body released a report in July claiming the country has not purchased any new Bitcoin since February. The report raised eyebrows, with commentators in the crypto space questioning El Salvador’s reports of Bitcoin purchases since February. El Salvador’s Bitcoin office has yet to directly address the IMF report, only taking to X to post about the Bitcoin purchases made by the country.

El Salvador secured a $1.4 billion funding deal from the IMF last December in exchange for reducing its Bitcoin initiatives. While the country agreed to the major terms proposed by the body, some other terms were reportedly disputed between the parties. One of the conditions that was gladly accepted is the use of Bitcoin as legal tender, allowing people to voluntarily accept it instead of enforcing the use of the asset through its Chivo wallet.

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