President Bukele had high hopes for Bitcoin in 2022.

El Salvador became the first country in the world to use bitcoin as legal tender, after it was adopted as such by the Legislative Assembly of El Salvador in 2021.^[1] It has been promoted by Nayib Bukele, the president of El Salvador, who claimed that it would improve the economy by making banking easier for Salvadorans, and that it would encourage foreign investment. In 2022, more Salvadorians had Bitcoin Lightning wallets than bank accounts……..

In March 2025, The Economist wrote that El Salvador’s bitcoin experiment had been a failure, bringing more costs than benefits to the El Salvador economy.^[4]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bitcoin_in_El_Salvador

On 10th March 2025, North Korean Lazarus Group hacked ByBit crypto exchange and stole £232m unrecoverable funds. Once exchanged into traditional currency, a trick they are also adept at, the funds contribute to the North Korea military build up.

Investigator Dr Tom Robinson of Elliptic, explains this group are highly diligent and sophisticated in cyber hacking and laundering funds acquired in this way. They have round the clock operations. They are highly successful at what they do.

Just a month earlier they stole 401,000 Ethereum coins from a wallet of one of ByBit’s suppliers by secretly altering the digital address the coins were being sent to.

Bybit’s CEO Ben Zhou, had to assure customers their funds were safe, having to obtain loans from investors to replenish the lost funds.

Dr Dorit Dor of Checkpoint doesn’t think the funds are likely to be recoverable due to the closed isolation of North Korea.

The attraction of crypto currency exchange is its private and anonymous nature and anyone who can trace and track customers successfully, maybe to catch criminals, would undermine the safety of funds of legitimate users.

The companies involved in the industry seem to have poor security in place. Thus the Lazarus Group target them.

2019 UpBit hacked for $40m

KuCoin hacked for $275m

2022 Ronin Bridge hacked for $600

Atomic Wallet hacked for $100m

Just take a look at Justin Sun, who brought in ‘stablecoin’.

Justin Sun is a Chinese-born Kittitian crypto billionaire and businessperson. He is the founder of TRON, a cryptocurrency with an associated blockchain DAO ecosystem and USDD, a stablecoin issued by TRON DAO Reserve. Wikipedia

He invested millions in Trump’s World Liberty Financial crypto project. The deal made was to make the Trump family enriched with 75% of the tokens revenues.

By its nature, crypto offers a particularly easy way to, anonymously or otherwise, funnel money into assets that directly benefit the president and his family.

………SEC, America’s top financial regulator, which two years ago charged Sun and his companies — Tron, BitTorrent and Rainberry — with selling unregistered securities and fraudulently manipulating the price of digital token Tronix. Sun and his companies sought to have the case dismissed……….

………Meanwhile, in a widely expected move, the SEC on Thursday officially dropped its enforcement action against US crypto exchange Coinbase, citing “the Commission’s ongoing efforts to reform and renew its regulatory approach to the crypto industry.”………

“Now anyone in world can essentially deposit money into bank account of President of USA with a couple clicks,” tweeted Anthony Scaramucci, former Trump White House communications director, after Trump launched a digital token known as a memecoin last month. “Every favor — geopolitical, corporate or personal — is now on sale, right out in the open.”

https://edition.cnn.com/2025/02/28/business/crypto-mogul-trump-coins-civil-fraud-charges/index.html

The lesson seems to be to become an isolated country and emulate the Lazarus Group approach. From evidence of the current administrations use of cryptocurrency, the US might be going in that direction.