Does Venezuela have a shadow crypto war chest?

The story took off after a post by an analyst who goes by Serenity on X. He cites what he describes as intelligence reporting and argues that Venezuelan officials started building up crypto holdings back in 2018, using multiple channels rather than a single pipeline.

According to the claim, roughly $2 billion in gold revenue may have been converted into about 400,000 BTC back when bitcoin’s average price was around $5,000.

Then oil enters the picture. From 2023 through 2025, Venezuela allegedly received another $10–15 billion in crypto assets through crude and related commodity sales. USDT is often mentioned in these arrangements because it’s a convenient settlement tool when access to dollar banking is limited. But because stablecoins can be frozen or blocked at the issuer level, some of that value was supposedly moved into bitcoin.

Those pieces add up to an estimated 600,000–660,000 BTC. At current prices, that’s roughly $56–67 billion. If numbers like that were real and if state-linked entities controlled the keys, Venezuela would instantly rank among the world’s largest BTC holders, on a scale comparable to major institutional portfolios.

Some posts go even further, suggesting this would place Venezuela behind only Satoshi Nakamoto, BlackRock, and MicroStrategy, while exceeding the U.S. government’s reported stash of about 325,000 coins. That comparison should be treated with caution: there is no official confirmation of any Venezuelan “reserve,” and most of the figures come from third-party estimates.

Still, the rumor matters because of the “what if.” If the U.S. were to try to seize coins connected to sanctioned networks, the market impact could be substantial, especially if a large amount of BTC suddenly became movable.

Politics has also pushed the topic into overdrive. On January 3, 2026, Western media reported that Nicolás Maduro had been captured and transported to the United States. Against that backdrop, Polymarket contracts in the “Maduro out by…?” series closed with a “Yes” outcome. One detail that grabbed attention: a new account, according to the platform, bought “Yes” at around $0.07 and turned the bet into a profit of more than $400,000.

When a large position shows up shortly before events that look like a covert operation, people start asking the obvious question: was it luck, or was it inside information? Either way, it drags Polymarket back into the same arguments about oversight, ethics, and what these markets actually measure, public expectations or access to closed-door facts.