What El Salvador would score
if goodwill became a signature.
El Salvador is not a live Network School search. There is no announced MOU and no named sponsor. It is on the watch list because it is the closest thing on earth to a culture-fit lock: the state has held Bitcoin on its balance sheet since 2021 and kept buying (holdings approached 7,680 BTC by mid-2026), El Zonte's Bitcoin Beach is the original circular crypto economy, and the Freedom Visa offers a citizenship-track residency for a $1M BTC or USDT contribution, capped at 1,000 per year.
The complications are equally real. Under the December 2024 IMF agreement for $1.4B, the legislature amended the Bitcoin Law in January 2025: private-sector acceptance is now voluntary and taxes can no longer be paid in BTC. Bitcoin City at Conchagua, announced in 2021 with volcano bonds, remains unbuilt with no confirmed 2026 status. And presidential goodwill toward crypto, however genuine, is not a written commitment to NS. Goodwill can reverse; the rubric prices that.
El Salvador inverts the Kazakhstan picture. Kazakhstan has the signature and needs the culture to form. El Salvador has the culture fully formed, at street level, in Spanish and in sats, and lacks the signature. The rubric says the signature is the scarcer asset, which is why a country that feels this aligned still caps at 49.
Country, region, state, facility.
NS scouts in this order. Each level has its own gate, and the level that killed Forest City was the last one.
El Salvador fails a gate.
No MOU, no named sponsor, no written commitment to Network School identified. The government's crypto orientation is well documented and its Bitcoin Office is a real institution, but institutional friendliness to Bitcoin is not a commitment to a specific campus. Every site below is capped at 49 until something is signed.
Multiple live routes: standard residency programs, a digital-nomad pathway, and the Freedom Visa, which offers citizenship-track residency for a $1M contribution in BTC or USDT, capped at 1,000 per year. Expensive at the top end, but the pathways exist and the state processes them with intent.
Private.law, El Salvador Bitcoin and Freedom Visa →3 candidates, scored.
Each scored 0-5 on nine weighted axes, normalized to 100, then gate-capped. Expand any site for the axis-by-axis breakdown with sources.
El Zonte (Bitcoin Beach)
The beach town where the Bitcoin Beach project bootstrapped a real circular sats economy years before the national law. Surf, warmth, and a community that already lives the way a Bitcoin-aligned node would want to live. The institutional layer is thin: ordinary municipal law, small-town infrastructure, and capacity that would need building rather than leasing.
Axis breakdown + sources
San Salvador
The capital: the airport, the ministries, the Bitcoin Office, the universities, and the country's deepest talent pool. The pragmatic choice if the goal is proximity to the institutions that would sign and service an MOU. Ordinary law, no special regime, and city livability rather than beach livability.
Axis breakdown + sources
Bitcoin City (Conchagua)
The 2021 announcement: a purpose-built city at the Conchagua volcano, funded by volcano bonds, powered by geothermal, with radical tax promises. As of 2026 it remains unbuilt, the bonds repeatedly delayed, and no confirmed construction status. It stays on the sheet because if it were ever executed it would be the most NS-shaped canvas in the hemisphere, and because the nearby Pacific airport project would change the connectivity math.
Axis breakdown + sources
El Salvador is the culture-fit outlier: the only candidate where the node would join an existing Bitcoin-native way of life rather than trying to grow one. El Zonte's raw score leads the unsigned Latin American set on exactly that basis, and the security turnaround removed the objection that used to end the conversation.
The resource-allocation read: this is the cheapest possible signature to test. The state already runs a Bitcoin Office, already courts crypto builders, and already sells residency for BTC. One conversation establishes whether presidential goodwill extends to a written campus commitment. If yes, El Zonte plus a capital liaison office becomes a serious flagship candidate; if no, the watch-list placement is correct and nothing was spent finding out.
The level that actually bites.
Not researched to facility level, because the country gate fails. Two structural notes worth recording now.
El Zonte capacity reality
Small-town coastal buildThe culture is here, but a 1,024-person campus is not: El Zonte is a small town, and NS-scale capacity means building, not leasing.
VERIFY: Model beds and units honestly against the NS form's capacity questions before any commitment; a node that has to construct its own housing inherits construction risk in a jurisdiction with thin large-project depth.
Bitcoin City execution risk
Announced greenfieldThe most NS-shaped canvas in the hemisphere on paper.
VERIFY: Treat announcements as zero until legislation is operative and ground is broken. The volcano bonds have been delayed since 2022; the rubric's rule about goodwill versus codified law applies doubly here.
The rubric, live.
Rate a candidate 0-5 on each axis, or load a site and adjust. Untick a hard gate to watch the score get capped.
Weights come from the Malaysia post-mortem: government partnership (3.0x) and immigration (2.5x) outrank cost and lifestyle. The three gates above are not scores. Untick one and the result is capped regardless of everything else, because a licence granted is a licence that can be revoked. Decision support, not an oracle.
- Government partnership is a hard gate, not a score. A site with no written, named commitment is capped below the top tier no matter how cheap or pleasant it is.
- Immigration is a hard gate. Model visa status for the actual member-nationality mix, not the average case.
- Verify permitted use at the facility level, in writing, per unit. Malaysia was fine. Johor was fine. A premises-use licence on two adjoining units is what actually closed the campus.
- Keep 'earned recognition' and 'political goodwill' distinct. Goodwill from a ministry can reverse; codified law is stickier.
- Every non-obvious number is either sourced or explicitly labeled an editorial estimate. Do not launder estimates into facts when this reaches decision-makers.
The form is the rubric.
NS runs a public second-site search with a finder's fee at ns.com/search. What the form asks is what NS weighs. Distilled below, grouped by their own hierarchy.
Multiple submissions allowed; judged spam earns nothing.
- Socials plus at least two links, biggest business run or exited
- Could you operate or invest in this node yourself?
- Are you native to the country you are proposing?
- Every available digital-nomad visa: name, length in months, income floor, renewability
- Have you personally applied and gotten one? Exact dates, how long, screenshots
- The top three champions of tech in the country, with links
- Can you introduce us to any of them?
- Closest major city and closest international airport, by code
- Air quality index
- Exact address with a maps link, ownership type, your relationship to it
- Property type, year built, building m², lot m², unit count, bed count, average unit size
- Zoning: what the property can LEGALLY be used for
- Inside a special economic zone?
- Gym? Move-in ready? Rent, sale, or both? Room for expansion nearby?
- Facilities within a 30 minute drive: grocery, hospital, restaurants, transit, beach, sports, school
- At least 5 photos, a video walkthrough, wifi speed in Mbps
- 01Visas are interrogated hardest: program name, months, income floor, renewability, and proof you personally got one. That confirms immigration as a top-weight axis, and it demands receipts, not vibes.
- 02Three named tech champions with warm-intro paths: the government-partnership axis starts as a people problem. A signature begins with someone who can walk you into the room.
- 03Zoning is asked as 'what can this property LEGALLY be used for'. That is the exact question Forest City failed. The form learned the same lesson the rubric did.
- 04Beds, units, move-in readiness, expansion room: speed to 1,024 residents is a first-class criterion. A gorgeous site that needs two years of construction loses to a move-in-ready one.
- 05Air quality index is a named field. Our rubric folded it into livability; NS asks for the number itself.
- 06The bounty shape ($100 to $100,000) says NS expects thousands of submissions and needs exactly one to be right. Precision beats volume; a judged-spam submission earns zero.
- ▢Zoning: the permitted use covers residence plus coworking plus education, per unit, in writing
- ▢Special economic zone status of the parcel itself, not the district around it
- ▢Move-in readiness: occupancy possible without construction, or a dated, penalized delivery schedule
- ▢Capacity: units and beds against the 1,024-resident target, with the expansion parcel identified
- ▢The burn: gym on site, and outdoor training viable in the local climate most of the year
- ▢Thirty-minute circle: grocery, hospital, restaurants, transit, and ideally a beach or mountains
- ▢Wifi speed measured on site in Mbps, plus the airport code and drive time
- ▢Air quality index for the site, not the country average
- Decrypt, El Salvador amends Bitcoin Law to comply with IMF terms
- Digital Watch, Bitcoin no longer full legal tender
- FinanceFeeds, El Salvador's BTC treasury near 7,680 BTC
- Private.law, the Freedom Visa ($1M BTC/USDT, 1,000/yr cap)
- KuCoin, where El Salvador stands in 2026
Axis scores are editorial estimates by Interneta from public sources, not an official Network School ranking. Every non-obvious claim carries a source; values without one are labeled editorial estimates in the breakdown.