Bhutan's BTC Reserve Is Nearly Spent
Bhutan transferred roughly 400 BTC (~$30.6 million) to an unlabelled address, leaving its labelled on-chain holdings at about 518 BTC per Lookonchain as relayed by coverage — down from a tracked peak of ~13,000 BTC in October 2024. Arkham's tracking through the year shows periodic outflows averaging ~$50 million a month to exchanges and OTC desks, with the government historically framing transfers as liquidity management; Arkham has also noted no meaningful mining inflow for over a year. An unlabelled destination cannot by itself confirm a sale.
Bhutan: the vanishing reserve
A country's Bitcoin doesn't vanish. It gets spent.
Bhutan quietly mined its way to 13,000 coins using cheap hydropower.
Today its labelled wallets hold roughly 518.
That is a 96% drop in under two years. And the mining that built the stash stopped refilling it more than a year ago.
The government has called past moves "liquidity management," not sales. The coins now sit at an unlabelled address, so the chain alone can't say.
But the pattern says: the previous transfers ended at exchanges and trading desks, in $5–10 million clips, month after month.
The money funded real things. Civil-servant salaries. Infrastructure. A planned city devoted to mindfulness.
Sensible spending, possibly. It's just not holding.
A reserve you keep drawing down isn't a reserve. It's a piggy bank.
And here is the fortnight's strange symmetry.
El Salvador's famous bitcoin pile turned out to grow by donation — the government wasn't buying.
Bhutan's pile was real, mined and owned — and it's nearly gone.
The two loudest sovereign bitcoin stories both dissolved when the receipts came out.
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- Bhutan transfers 400 BTC to unlabelled address, leaving sovereign holdings at 518 BTC · cryptobriefing.com · T2