Probe Into Venezuela’s Bitcoin Reserve Confirmed By White House Adviser
Executive director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets Patrick Witt stated US officers are actively analyzing how Venezuela’s Maduro regime was financed, together with whether or not any worth sits in Bitcoin and “digital belongings,” as hypothesis mounted earlier this month that current Venezuela-linked actions might have surfaced a big Bitcoin cache. The feedback cease wanting confirming any seizure, however they place Bitcoin explicitly inside an ongoing national-security evaluation.
White House Adviser Confirms Bitcoin Investigation
In a CoinDesk interview on Tuesday, Witt was requested whether or not digital belongings had been seized and what the US would possibly do with them. Witt declined to supply specifics, citing the sensitivity of the scenario, however described an interagency effort scrutinizing potential funding sources tied to the regime.
“Obviously, creating scenario down there, nonetheless working by means of it, numerous nationwide safety equities there,” Witt stated. “So people are speaking, they’re wanting on the scenario general, how the Maduro regime was financed and the place a few of these belongings, whether or not it’s on the oil facet, precise bodily commodities or digital belongings perhaps. So I can’t touch upon something there as of now, however there’s plenty of people within the nationwide safety equipment engaged and searching into that.”
The key takeaway for markets is procedural moderately than tactical: Witt didn’t validate any declare that bitcoin or different tokens had been seized, however he did verify that crypto is being thought-about alongside commodity-linked worth as investigators map financing channels.
The White House warning comes towards a viral claim that Venezuela may control greater than 600,000 BTC, an assertion amplified by a extensively circulated Whale Hunting / Project Brazen publication by Bradley Hope and Clara Preve. That piece framed the thought as a thesis pushed by intelligence sourcing and circumstantial monetary logic, not on-chain attribution.
Subsequent on-chain analysis has emphasised the hole between the headline quantity and what blockchain analysts can truly show. DL News reported that forensics companies “have struggled to seek out any Bitcoin in any respect held by the regime,” citing Arkham and TRM Labs as saying they’d not recognized holdings on the scale being claimed.
Skepticism has additionally centered on the dearth of traceable beginning factors. Fortune quoted Nansen principal analysis analyst Aurelie Barthere saying the Project Brazen report “doesn’t point out any addresses as a place to begin, making it tough to confirm” the hypothesis.
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $89,285.
