Rumors that the Venezuelan government may secretly hold up to $60 billion worth of Bitcoin have recently been circulating in the market. However, Mauricio Di Bartolomeo, co-founder of Ledn, poured cold water on these claims—most of these assertions are based on speculation and secondhand information, lacking credible on-chain evidence to prove that these Bitcoins are truly in the hands of the state.

It is worth noting that Di Bartolomeo was born and raised in Venezuela and has worked in Bitcoin mining there for many years. Based on his personal experience and background, the likelihood of the Venezuelan regime holding a "large-scale, centralized Bitcoin reserve" is actually quite low.

Currently, there are three main sources of inference regarding this topic: first, the 2018 sale of gold in exchange for Bitcoin; second, Bitcoin settlement of oil trade revenues; third, government confiscation or seizure of mining equipment. Di Bartolomeo admits that Venezuela has indeed used cryptocurrency in some oil transactions, and the government has indeed confiscated private mining equipment, but the key point is—there is no concrete evidence that the approximately $2.7 billion worth of gold transactions ultimately converted into Bitcoin.

At this point, it is necessary to mention a figure: the current Minister of Industry and National Production, Alex Saab. Saab was detained by the United States from 2020 to 2023 and returned to Venezuela at the end of 2023 through a prisoner exchange agreement. Some speculate that the Bitcoin assets he controls could have been quite substantial at that time, but similarly, there is no definitive on-chain proof.