TechFlow news, on January 8, according to CoinDesk, Mauricio Di Bartolomeo, co-founder of the cryptocurrency lending platform Ledn, questioned the rumor that the Venezuelan government holds $60 billion worth of Bitcoin.
As a cryptocurrency entrepreneur born and raised in Venezuela, Di Bartolomeo believes this claim lacks credible on-chain evidence. He analyzed three possible sources of Bitcoin: the large-scale gold sales in 2018, oil revenues priced in Bitcoin, and confiscated mining equipment, pointing out that the Venezuelan government's history of corruption and mismanagement makes it difficult to accumulate such a scale of crypto assets. He specifically mentioned that the Venezuelan central bank's publicly disclosed reserves are only about $9.9 billion, with no Bitcoin holdings disclosed, and the country's severe electricity shortages also pose challenges for large-scale mining operations.
