Bhutan has twice as much bitcoin as El Salvador, Arkham Intelligence says. The cryptocurrency is managed by the kingdom’s investment arm, Druk Holdings (DHI).
Bhutan has bitcoins, more than El Salvador!
Bhutan is a landlocked kingdom in the eastern Himalayas. Its population is just 790,000 and its area is 38,394 square meters. The country, it turns out, has bitcoins. And quite a lot of them.
The Arkham Intelligence platform indicated Bitcoin addresses in its report. These belong to DHI and contain a little over 13,000 BTC (about $758 million). In addition, there are ethers, binance coins and polygon.
The full list of coins looks like this:
To understand the significance of this investment, it is worth adding that Bhutan’s gross domestic product (GDP) is only expected to reach $3 billion this year. That means BTC will account for just over a quarter of GDP!
Where did these bitcoins come from?
To understand where Bhutan got its bitcoins, you have to go back in time to the spring of 2019. That’s when, as officials confirmed a few months ago, the country began mining BTC using hydropower. Then, in May 2023, DHI partnered with Bitdeer to develop a carbon-neutral bitcoin mining process in Bhutan. In April 2024, it unveiled upgrades to increase the local mine’s mining capacity by 500 megawatts by the first half of 2025, bringing its total capacity to 600 MW.
It turns out that Bhutan started investing in BTC earlier than El Salvador. What’s more, according to Nayib Tracker, a tool that allows you to track the value of the country’s portfolio, Nayib Bukele’s government currently has “only” 5,875 BTC, worth a total of $331 million. So Bhutan has about twice as much.
El Salvador also uses renewable energy to mine BTC. This time, it’s geothermal energy, not hydropower, as is the case in Bhutan.
