$240B IN E-COINS ERASED

Not-so-$uper Tuesday

Nearly $240 billion in value was wiped from the cryptocurrency market on Tuesday as El Salvador contended with a bumpy rollout of bitcoin as legal tender and major crypto exchanges saw widespread global outages.

The broad market for cryptocurrencies fell from more than $2.3 trillion in value to below $2.08 trillion by 4 p.m., according to data from CoinMarketCap.com — down nearly 12 percent in 24 hours.

All of the major cryptos were down, except for Solana, which has soared more than 300 percent over the past month. The 4-year-old e-coin was trading late Tuesday around 7 percent higher on the day.

Bitcoin, meanwhile, fell by as much as 16 percent Tuesday morning, but recovered slightly and was trading Tuesday evening down about 10 percent, at around $46,800 per coin.

Ethereum was just shy of 14 percent lower as of 4 p.m., at about $3,420 per coin. Dogecoin was down more than 18 percent, at $2.47 per token.

The sharp sell-off came on the same day as El Salvador’s highly anticipated official rollout of bitcoin as legal tender in the country.

The launch came with some stumbles as the country’s official e-wallet app was unavailable Tuesday morning on major app stores like Apple’s and Google’s exchanges.

El Salvador temporarily disabled the app, called Chivo, to increase the capacity of its servers to meet demand, President Nayib Bukele announced in a tweet. The lack of capacity was blocking users from installing the app, he said.

“Any data they try to enter at this time will give them an error,” he said. “This is a relatively straightforward problem, but it cannot be fixed with the system connected.”

Earlier Tuesday, El Salvador’s government bought 400 bitcoin, worth about $21 million at the time, Bukele announced, making it the first country to put the crypto on its balance sheet and hold it in its reserves.

After the price began to drop Tuesday, Bukele announced the country bought another 150 e-coins.

Bukele also tweeted images Tuesday of businesses, including Pizza Hut, embracing the country’s new currency. But not everyone was cheering, with Reuters reporting more than 1,000 people marching in the capital city of San Salvador, saying the initiative only benefits speculators, not everyday people.