Bitcoin entered the national spotlight over the weekend after a report alleged that Venezuela had secretly amassed 600,000 BTC, linked to the kidnapping of US President Nicolás Maduro.
The new Whale Hunting investigation came as Washington presented its own shock to Caracas: over the weekend, the US military kidnapped Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and took him to the United States, where he is expected to face charges in New York. Against that background, the report makes a big claim: that the shadow network of the Maduro era may have accumulated Bitcoin on a scale that would be among the largest in the world.
The piece, published by Project Brazen’s Whale Hunting, said Alex Saab, who has long been described as the main financial function of the Maduro government, “can control $60 billion in Bitcoin” tied to the government. If you translate that amount into coins, the value of crypto X is around 600,000–660,000 BTC, although that conversion comes from a social media conversation rather than the report itself.
What We Know About the Venezuelan Bitcoin Reserve
However, time is of the essence. The authors set the US invasion as the opening act and the money trail as the second real act. In one of the wisest passages of this article, Whale Hunting puts it this way: “Nicolás Maduro is arrested in the US. Where is the money? His name is Alex Saab.”
The report does not reveal the on-chain attribution that proves the 60 billion dollar. It says the allegations come from HUMINT sources and “have not been confirmed by blockchain analysis.” That caveat does the actual work: the story is written as a narrative of intelligence and networks, not a blockchain-forensics teardown.
What the authors provide is a sound diagram based on Venezuela’s resource flows and historical BTC price bands. Venezuela exported “73.2 tons of gold in 2018 alone,” the report notes, about $2.7 billion at that time, and says that converting even a small portion to Bitcoin when BTC trades between $3,000 and $10,000 may yield more profits if caught at the peak of the 2021 cycle.
They then describe the pipeline that allegedly operates: gold money transferred between Turkish and Emirati intermediaries, through mixers, and into cold wallets “beyond the application of Western laws,” with access concentrated in a small group at Saab. The stated danger is simple: even if the authorities can catch people, they may not be able to catch the keys.
Maduro’s capture immediately mixed two issues that usually reside in different parts of the market’s brain: geopolitics and the strategic-bitcoin-reserve discussion. Former Bitwise director and now ProCap CIO Jeff Park posted on X, “What if Venezuela is a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” emphasizing a satirical version of that combination in one sentence.
Others do the math. Crypto analyst MartyParty (@martypartymusic) suggested: “With an assumed 600-660k $BTC added to the existing 328k in US Government funds the SBR value will be roughly 928k-988k. Very close to the proposed 1m Bitcoin from the first Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Senate caps.”
At press time, Bitcoin traded at $92,558.
The featured image was created with DALL.E, a chart from TradingView.com
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