The startup that developed El Salvador's bitcoin wallets and ATMs is taking the product global

The company that developed the technology underpinning El Salvador’s state-backed bitcoin wallet app and ATMs is now packaging up that technology and rolling it into a product that other governments, banks and institutions could use to help adoption of electronic payments and open up remittance channels. 

In an interview with The Block, Athena bitcoin CEO Eric Gravengaard confirmed that the company is responsible for developing the technology behind the Chivo wallet app and also owns and operates the 200 Chivo-branded ATMs in the country. He plans to give a talk on Thursday at the ongoing LABITCONF conference in San Salvador about Athena’s role in the country’s bitcoin adoption. 

Athena has not previously confirmed the extent of its role in the Chivo infrastructure, although it has announced plans to roll out ATMs in the country. The company told The Block that a “strict NDA” has kept it from releasing many key details until now. 

This helps explain why figuring out who has been involved in Chivo — and what they are doing — hasn’t been straightforward. Gravengaard, speaking on a video call from his company’s new office in San Salvador, confirmed that a diagram leaked in August accurately put Athena at the center of the Chivo wallet and back-end.

Now, the company best known for its own bitcoin ATMs is pitching the same kind of thing to other governments and institutions wanting to encourage crypto adoption to solve their own specific issues. 

The new product is called Ruru, which means “owl” in Māori — an official language in New Zealand spoken by an indiginous people of the same name. The Ruru platform is designed to help governments and other institutions “run a developing economy,” Gravengaard said.

At the time of writing this article, Athena’s website described Ruru as a “comprehensive financial platform that facilitates the use of digital currency and electronic banking to power economies in need of access and inclusion.” While Athena has ATMs in several other countries including the US, Colombia and Argentina, Ruru is derived specifically from the suite of technology and services that Athena has launched in El Salvador. 

“We want to use our platform of ATMs, point-of-sale and wallets to help other countries or regions rapidly increase adoption of electronic payments, of having a balance held electronically, and open the corridors to their remittance markets and make them open,” Gravengaard said. 

According to Gravengaard, most remittances in El Salvador have historically come in through “closed channels,” which don’t necessarily integrate readily with fintech platforms. However, he says the country has opened that system by providing the option of using Chivo or other wallets to hold value. Likewise, while certain stores and merchants are using Chivo for processing transactions in bitcoin to comply with the new law making it legal tender, others are using alternatives like OpenNode.

According to its website, Ruru involves a payment system called Athena Pay, a mobile wallet, ATMs, point-of-sale terminals and APIs integrations. The site also lists a service called Vanguard 1, which allows companies to pay employees in bitcoin. Meanwhile, the extent to which other countries would be interested in Ruru isn’t clear. Gravengaard said that Athena is in talks with government officials and other players about Ruru, but did not provide specifics.

Since launching on September 7— the day El Salvador’s bitcoin law went into effect — Athena calculates that Ruru has logged 3.8 million users, is used by more than 13,000 businesses, has more than 200,000 daily users and sees a million daily remittances in the Central American nation. 

But it appears El Salvador is continuing to keep a handle on what information that the companies involved in Chivo can share. For example, while Athena currently lists figures about Ruru on its website, the company had briefly posted a separate set of numbers to the site on Nov. 16. These referenced a higher user count, as well as daily operation, transaction and volume information. But when The Block reached out to Athena to verify the accuracy of these numbers, an Athena press contact said the numbers were being taken down. “They’re not approved so, consequently they’re inaccurate until approved,” that person said. It also listed the names of some customers in El Salvador, which also appear to have been removed.

In addition to the Chivo ATMs, Athena operates five ATMs with its own branding in El Salvador. These are strategically located in convenient locations like El Zonte, a Pacific surfing village home to the Bitcoin Beach project. Unlike the Chivo-branded ATMs, the Athena machines charge a commission. Therefore, they are competing on location instead of price, Gravengaard said. 

“It starts with the ATMs. The ATMs build trust, they build trust not only in Athena because we run them but more broadly what it represents to bitcoin,” Gravengaard said. “Bitcoin is money because you can take $20 out of an ATM.”

Gravengaard said the team has been hard at work on fixing the bugs that Chivo experienced early on. But he says that privacy or security concerns aren’t the biggest issues Athena is looking at. Its priority is introducing electronic payments in a place where, for example, paying bills in person is common. People may not understand how the numbers representing bitcoin in an app could translate into usable money.  

“I don’t see those as our main challenges for this,” said Gravengaard, referring to privacy and security issues. He added that Athena’s goals are centered around questions such as:  “How do we bank the unbanked? How do we do that at scale? How do we solve the problems that people are having at scale?”