600,000 Bitcoin Allegedly Held In Venezuelan Shadow Reserve: Report

Bitcoin entered the geopolitical highlight over the weekend after a report alleged Venezuela secretly amassed as a lot as 600,000 BTC, coinciding with the US seize of President Nicolás Maduro.

A brand new Whale Hunting investigation landed simply as Washington delivered its personal shock to Caracas: over the weekend, US forces captured Venezuelan chief Nicolás Maduro and transported him to the United States, the place he’s anticipated to face federal costs in New York. Against that backdrop, the report makes an enormous declare: {that a} Maduro-era shadow community could have stockpiled Bitcoin on a scale that may immediately rank among the many greatest on the planet.

The piece, revealed by Project Brazen’s Whale Hunting, says Alex Saab, lengthy described as a key monetary operator for the Maduro authorities, “could management $60 billion in Bitcoin” tied to the regime. If you translate that notional worth into cash, the determine ricocheting round crypto X has been roughly 600,000–660,000 BTC, although that conversion is coming from social-media extrapolation fairly than the report itself.

What We Know About The Venezuelan Bitcoin Reserve

Still, timing issues. The authors body the US raid because the opening act and the cash path as the true second act. In one of many article’s bluntest passages, Whale Hunting places it this fashion: “Nicolás Maduro is in US custody. Where is the cash? His title is Alex Saab.”

The report doesn’t current an on-chain attribution proving a $60 billion hoard. It says the allegation comes from HUMINT sources and “has not been confirmed by way of blockchain evaluation.” That caveat is doing actual work: the story is written as an intelligence-and-networks narrative, not a blockchain-forensics teardown.

What the authors do provide is a plausibility sketch primarily based on Venezuela’s useful resource flows and historic BTC worth bands. Venezuela exported “73.2 tons of gold in 2018 alone,” the report notes, roughly $2.7 billion on the time, and argues that changing even a fraction into Bitcoin when BTC traded between roughly $3,000 and $10,000 might yield outsized features if held into the 2021 cycle peak.

They then define an alleged operational pipeline: gold proceeds routed by way of Turkish and Emirati intermediaries, handed by way of mixers, and moved into chilly wallets “past the attain of Western enforcement,” with entry concentrated amongst a small group round Saab. The implied threat is straightforward: even when authorities can seize folks, they might not be capable to seize keys.

The Maduro seize instantly fused two storylines that normally stay in several elements of the market’s mind: geopolitics and the strategic-bitcoin-reserve discourse. Former Bitwise exec and now ProCap CIO Jeff Park posted through X, “What if Venezuela is the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” crystallizing the cynical model of that mash-up in a single sentence.

Others ran the arithmetic. Crypto commentator MartyParty (@martypartymusic) suggested: “With the assumed 600-660k $BTC added to the prevailing 328k within the US Government wallets the overall of the SBR can be roughy 928k-988k. Very near the projected 1m Bitcoin from the unique Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Senate markups.”

At press time, Bitcoin traded at $92,558.