When I asked Alejandra Guajardo at Bitcoin Amsterdam how people react to her outside El Salvador, she said they want to know whether it is true that everyone there uses bitcoin. “The truth is that Salvadorians, they don’t use Bitcoin,” the founder of Miss Bitcoin and of the skincare brand Sada Organics told me. Later in the same answer she added that more people now spend and accept bitcoin than in 2021: “Like right now, way more.”
Guajardo was Miss Universe El Salvador 2022, and since then her work has been getting people curious about bitcoin. The rest of our conversation was about that work: lessons in public schools, bookshelves in the shape of a B, and a pageant where looks are not what wins.
I sat down with her on Friday 6 November, the second day of the conference at the SugarFactory in Halfweg, just outside Amsterdam. She also spoke on the Orange Stage that day, in the 14:30 panel “Creating a Bitcoin Brand” with Lea Thompson, Neil Jacobs and Randi Hipper, according to the Bitcoin Amsterdam agenda. I am the MC of that stage on Friday, so I introduced the session.
| What you need to know |
|---|
| 1Alejandra Guajardo, Miss Universe El Salvador 2022, founded Miss Bitcoin and the tallow skincare brand Sada Organics. On Friday 6 November she was on the Orange Stage panel "Creating a Bitcoin Brand". |
| 2Asked what people abroad want to know, she said most Salvadorans do not use bitcoin and that its users are mostly foreigners and bitcoiners, but that more people spend and accept it now than in 2021. |
| 3She described two education projects of her own: B-shaped bookshelves of bitcoin books, so far in El Salvador's National Library and in Mexico, and Miss Bitcoin, a pageant where she wants "the best project" to win one bitcoin. |
| 4My read: every project she described goes after one problem, friends who "have a block" about bitcoin, and tries to get past it with a format people already like. |
The full conversation runs nearly 13 minutes.
What people abroad ask her about El Salvador
Her country made bitcoin legal tender in 2021, and that is the story people still bring to her. This is how she described their questions, and her reply:
They want to know if it’s true that everyone uses Bitcoin and every business accepts Bitcoin. They’re super curious about that. And the truth is that Salvadorians, they don’t use Bitcoin. Most of them, they are the ones that don’t use Bitcoin. Foreigners mostly, Bitcoiners of course.
Alejandra Guajardo, Miss Bitcoin
She was just as specific about where bitcoin does get used. “At the beach, there’s more places than in the actual capital where they accept Bitcoin because most of the Bitcoiners are at the beach,” she said. Businesses that accept it get “another audience”, in her words “a quality audience”, and some give “discounts if you pay with Bitcoin”. Then she set the trend next to the snapshot:
But yeah, I will say with time, it’s getting more adoption, more people are spending Bitcoin and are accepting Bitcoin than 2021 when it was legal tender. Like right now, way more.
Alejandra Guajardo, Miss Bitcoin
The legal side has moved since 2021. Before the IMF approved its loan programme on 26 February 2025, El Salvador changed its law so that accepting bitcoin is voluntary for private businesses and taxes are paid only in US dollars, according to the IMF. In its latest review, on 1 October 2026, the fund said majority ownership and control of the government wallet Chivo had passed to a private operator. Our October piece on El Salvador’s bitcoin reserve and the IMF (in Dutch) has more background.
Her version is more useful than the one people abroad expect. She names the places where bitcoin is used, the beach and the businesses that reward paying with it, and she measures progress against 2021, the year it became legal tender.
Read the thread on X
The designer who said no to bitcoin
Her own start in bitcoin education came from a costume. She wanted bitcoin in the traditional costume she would wear at Miss Universe, and the designer refused:
When I told the designer what I wanted to wear as my traditional costume at Miss Universe, the first thing that he said when I mentioned about Bitcoin, he was like, no. I was like, why? And then he was like, because the government made this to steal our money.
Alejandra Guajardo, Miss Bitcoin
At first, she said, “I didn’t understand.” Then she drew her own conclusion: “he’s saying this because they don’t have education.” So she went to where education starts:
So after Miss Universe, I went to public schools in El Salvador to teach little kids about Bitcoin. And that’s how my journey started in Bitcoin.
Alejandra Guajardo, Miss Bitcoin
A clothing brand followed, she said, and today she works on three projects. The personal one is Sada Organics, which sells beef tallow skincare and, according to its website, accepts bitcoin as payment. The other two are about teaching. When I asked whether El Salvador’s schools should put bitcoin on the curriculum, she said it is already happening: “they are actually now implementing Bitcoin education in schools.” Before that, she said, it took some time, perhaps to develop the system, “but now definitely there is education in public schools about Bitcoin.”
Bookshelves in the shape of a B
The Bitcoin Bookshelf takes the same idea beyond the classroom. She makes the shelves “in form of B”, fills them and gives them away:
I fill them with Bitcoin only books and I donate it to public spaces around the world. I put the first one in the National Library in El Salvador, the second one in Mexico, and now currently I’m working in one in Uruguay, one in Argentina and Chile.
Alejandra Guajardo, Miss Bitcoin
Her goal, she said, “is to put one in every country”. Before we moved on, I promised her on camera that we would talk about bringing one to the Netherlands, to a library in The Hague. “I would love to,” she said.
A pageant where the project wins
Her third project took up the most time in our conversation. She wants to make bitcoin “more relatable, more appealing to women” through Miss Bitcoin, a pageant she describes as “a beauty competition where the looks is not the most important thing”. What counts is the bitcoin project each contestant develops in the year she represents her country:
So the best project is going to win. Not the most beautiful one, no.
Alejandra Guajardo, Miss Bitcoin
In her plan, “the best Bitcoin project that wins is going to get one Bitcoin to develop her project”. Pageants should be “not like the fiat system, but now with Bitcoin”, she said.
The design answers a problem that anyone who has tried to explain bitcoin to friends will recognise:
Every time that I try to speak to my friends about Bitcoin and make them understand, they are like, they have a block, right?
Alejandra Guajardo, Miss Bitcoin
A competition gives that friend a reason to learn. Contestants would have to learn about bitcoin and build a project around it, and the organisation of Miss Bitcoin will teach them the basics and how to develop the project. “It doesn’t matter if you don’t know anything because we will teach you that,” she said. The final will be in Nashville, she told me, under the slogan “beauty, brains and Bitcoin”.
When I asked for her biggest wish for 2027, she named the pageant and its first winner: “My biggest wish is to make the beauty pageant and to have the first representative of the beauty of Bitcoin being in conferences and talking about her project.”
Long-term thinking, and no expectations
I asked how she keeps growing in bitcoin herself. Her answer started with other women, and with a question people ask her: how she started. When she explains how it made sense for her, “they start to be more curious about learning”. What she wants to pass on, she said, is the basics, how bitcoin “can give you freedom”, and “the principles of Bitcoin, that it’s quality, long-term thinking, freedom, sovereignty.”
She did not come to Amsterdam with a fixed idea of what the trip would bring. In general, she said, “I try not to have expectations so life can surprise me.” When the first Miss Bitcoin final takes place, the thing to look at is the projects on stage, because in her design that is what wins.
Read next
- Every Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026 interview on Cryptofocus, recorded over both days at the SugarFactory.
- Kelly Ann Collins of SheCrypto on the women in crypto who may go unseen, the audience Miss Bitcoin wants to reach.
- Laura Peijs and Lisanne Drost of Crypto Women Collective on why a trusted conversation does more than advertising, the same first-conversation problem from another angle.
- Ryan “Phunky” Haczynski of Buy The Cat, another day-two guest who uses something familiar, a cute orange kitten, to start a conversation about bitcoin.
- Alejandra Guajardo is on X; her own site is alejandrasada.com.
I recorded the interview with Alejandra Guajardo at Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026, at the SugarFactory in Halfweg, on 6 November 2026. Quotes are verbatim, with filler removed. Cryptofocus is a media partner of Bitcoin Amsterdam 2026; I moderated a panel there on 5 November and am the MC of the Orange Stage on 6 November. Nothing here is financial advice.
