The study was conducted by a non-profit organization based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. It surveyed 1800 families in urban and rural areas. Chivo's unexpected small success may be in providing banking services to people without bank accounts. Researchers say those who continue to use the chivo wallet are using it to hold and transfer dollars, El Salvador's official currency, similar to any digital wallet or bank. Some respondents told the researchers that they used the app as a dollar debit card.
Chivo was launched in September 2021, when President naibuker made El Salvador the first country in the world to make bitcoin a legal tender. He said that the application for storing and exchanging bitcoin could save Salvadorans $6 billion in handling fees sent from abroad to the country every year and promote economic development.
However, things did not go as planned. Chivo's launch was plagued by functional and security issues. The National Bureau of economic research found that although about half of Salvadorans surveyed have downloaded chivo so far, 40% of which occurred in September 2021, about 61% of them abandoned it after receiving a $30 registration award. According to the Central Bank of El Salvador, in February 2022, only 1.6% of all remittances were bitcoins received through digital wallets. In 2022, chivo's downloads have been negligible, indicating that the driving force has been exhausted. Some people who insist on using the app are using it for transactions unrelated to bitcoin. The survey found that the median number of active users would not send or receive a bitcoin payment per month, nor would they withdraw money from chivo's ATM. Research shows that there are few business or key use cases in chivo's transactions.
These findings suggest that millions of dollars of taxpayer funds may have been spent on creating an application that serves more as a primary digital wallet than a new technology that can help El Salvador transform into a regional technology center. But even holding dollars in chivo may not be as safe as it seems. On April 27, the local media El Faro disclosed that what users actually hold in their chivo wallet is not US dollars, but usdc (US dollar stable coin) that may be supported by the Salvadoran government or private companies.