Sanctions have walled off the country’s access to financial markets for years, and experts allege that they may have motivated Venezuelan leaders to invest in cryptocurrencies to sidestep the barrier.
The claims of Venezuela’s shadow Bitcoin holdings have predictably garnered skeptics, including digital asset financial services company Ledn Co-founder Mauricio di Bartolomeo, who grew up in Venezuela and whose family has mined crypto there since 2014.
Di Bartolomeo finds no credibility in any of the three alleged sources of bitcoin income: the gold swap, oil exchange or mining equipment seizures. “This to me does not align with anything in the public record,” di Bartolomeo told Fortune. “There’s so much corruption, embezzlement and missing money that I don’t believe that any meaningful amount would have accrued.”
Di Bartolomeo says that stablecoins have grown in popularity in Venezuela amid rampant inflation. Many Venezuelans send remittances to their families using stablecoins as the currency has a better exchange rate differential than liquid cash.
It is near impossible to track how much crypto the Venezuelan government holds, given the decentralized and clandestine properties of the asset. However, if true, the claims could potentially reshape global Bitcoin markets.
While most of the U.S. government’s crypto holdings were accrued through law enforcement seizures, the rise of crypto as a state-controlled asset entered the mainstream last year after President Trump signed the executive order to create a national Bitcoin reserve to bolster the U.S’s position in digital assets, at no cost to taxpayers.
Now that the U.S. is in effective control of Venezuela, with ambiguous statements from Trump that the U.S. “is going to run” the country, it is unclear what will happen to any Bitcoin reserves that do exist. Real or fake, the claim demonstrates the currency’s growing geopolitical significance and the Trump administration’s willingness to advance its interest in the digital assets industry.
