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Governments Hold a Surprising Amount of Bitcoin
According to BitcoinTreasuries, governments around the world hold a total of 567,000 Bitcoins, worth over $36 billion as of April 2024. However, the cryptocurrency has yet to be adopted by central banks.
Which governments own bitcoins?
BitcoinTreasuries tracks the amount of Bitcoin on the balance sheets of companies and other large entities, including governments. The website is created and maintained by Coinkite, a leading manufacturer of Bitcoin security hardware, and aggregates data from available sources such as SEC filings, quarterly reports, and press releases.
Known Bitcoin reserves held by governments represent 2.7% of the total supply of 21 million bitcoins, the largest being that of the US government with over 210,000 bitcoins worth over $13 billion at the time of writing.
In terms of scale, public companies hold a total of 305,000 bitcoins, the majority of which is held by MicroStrategy, which has been accumulating bitcoins fervently since adopting the cryptocurrency as its primary treasury reserve asset in 2020. It even went so far as to rebrand itself as the “Bitcoin Development Company.” Yet despite its best efforts, MicroStrategy’s bitcoin holdings only recently surpassed those of the U.S. government, reaching 214,000 bitcoins in March 2024 with the purchase of an additional 9,000 bitcoins.
Are Governments Adopting Bitcoin as a Reserve Currency?
Only El Salvador is actively adopting Bitcoin, purchasing its first 200 Bitcoins and making the cryptocurrency legal tender in 2021. El Salvador has managed to accumulate over 5,700 Bitcoins through Bitcoin mining with The energy of volcanoessell passports and buy one bitcoin per day.
Sometimes it really does pay to fight crime
Neither the US, China, the UK, nor Germany bought their bitcoins. Instead, these vast fortunes were all seized from criminals. The US owes its leading position in bitcoin to the Silk Road, the infamous dark web marketplace that was one of the first use cases for the digital currency. The Silk Road was shut down by the FBI in 2013 when bitcoin was trading at around $100. China’s 190,000 bitcoins were seized from the PlusToken Ponzi scheme in 2019. The UK came into possession of 61,000 bitcoins after a former fast food worker tried to buy a £23 million mansion. In January 2024, Germany acquired 50,000 Bitcoins operators of a website called movie2k, suspected of “unauthorized commercial exploitation of copyrighted works.”
It is expected that all of these confiscated Bitcoins will eventually be auctioned off. In fact, the United States has already sold 195,000 Bitcoins, receiving a total of $366 millionToday, those bitcoins would be worth $12.6 billion. If bitcoin were to continue to behave as it has in the past, by 2030, the 210,000 bitcoins in reserve in the United States would begin to rival its central bank’s gold reserves, which are currently worth more than $600 billion.
The story continues
Tracking Bitcoins from the Dark Web to Government Pockets
Despite Bitcoin’s association with cybercrime and its reputation for anonymity, transactions are actually not anonymous but rather pseudonymous, with identities represented by unique cryptographic addresses. The details of each Bitcoin transaction are publicly available and can be viewed on sites such as mempool spaceBy analyzing the blockchain, it is possible to deduce the true identity behind a Bitcoin address. This level of transparency has helped catch criminals, but can also bring transparency to legitimate institutions. El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele shared the country’s bitcoin address to X (formerly Twitter), so now everyone can check that they are sticking to their goal of one Bitcoin per day.
“Governments Hold a Surprising Amount of Bitcoin” was originally created and published by Verdicta brand owned by GlobalData.
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