Government Bitcoin Reserves

How nation states come to hold Bitcoin — seizures, mining, purchases — from the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve to El Salvador and Bhutan, with verification caveats explained and every claim cited.

How governments end up holding Bitcoin

Governments rarely set out to become Bitcoin whales. With only a handful of exceptions, sovereign Bitcoin positions were not bought — they were confiscated. Law-enforcement agencies seize coins from darknet markets, Ponzi schemes, hacks, and fraud cases, and those coins then sit in government-controlled wallets for years while forfeiture litigation grinds forward. A second, much smaller path is state-run mining: Bhutan built its position by mining with surplus hydropower rather than seizing or buying anything. The third path — deliberate purchase as a reserve asset — was pioneered by El Salvador in 2021 and has since been written into law by the United States federal government and several US states, though actual purchased amounts remain tiny next to seized stockpiles.

That origin story matters for anyone reading holdings data. Seized coins are an accident of prosecution, not a policy stance; they can be sold (Germany, 2024), returned to victims (the Bitfinex recovery), retained by design (the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve), or simply left in limbo (the United Kingdom, China). This guide walks through each major case, then explains how holdings estimates are produced and why every one of them carries real uncertainty. For the live, sourced tracker behind this guide, see governments that own Bitcoin and the full holders list.

Major government holders at a glance

All figures below are estimates as of mid-2026, primarily from on-chain analysis; none are audited official disclosures unless noted. See the uncertainty section below before quoting any of them.

Government	Estimated BTC (mid-2026)	Provenance	Status
United States	~198,000 to ~328,000 (estimates diverge; see below)	Seizures: Silk Road, Bitfinex hack, Prince Group fraud, others	Strategic Bitcoin Reserve established by executive order, March 2025; large portions still contested in court
United Kingdom	~61,000	2018 seizure tied to a Chinese investment-fraud case	Disposal contested; High Court hearing held February 2026
China	~194,000 claimed; possibly zero	2019 PlusToken Ponzi seizure	Unknown — on-chain analysts believe most or all was sold in 2019
El Salvador	~7,700	Direct purchases since 2021, incl. a 1-BTC-per-day program	Held; IMF disputes whether new buying has continued since 2025
Bhutan	~3,100 to ~4,000	State hydropower mining via Druk Holding & Investments	On-chain data shows roughly 70% sold since October 2024; officials dispute this
Germany	~0	2024 movie2k seizure (~50,000 BTC)	Sold in full, June to July 2024

The United States: the seizure machine

The US government became the largest known sovereign Bitcoin holder entirely through law enforcement. Four cases account for the bulk of it.

Silk Road: Individual X and James Zhong

In November 2020, the Justice Department seized roughly 69,370 BTC from an unnamed hacker, "Individual X," who had stolen the coins from the Silk Road darknet market in 2012 and 2013 — at the time the largest cryptocurrency seizure in DOJ history. A US court later finalized the forfeiture of those coins. A second Silk Road case followed: in November 2021, agents seized 50,676 BTC from James Zhong, who had exploited Silk Road's withdrawal system in 2012; the DOJ announced the seizure and Zhong's wire-fraud conviction in November 2022, valuing it at 3.36 billion dollars.

The Bitfinex hack recovery

In February 2022, the DOJ seized about 94,000 BTC — roughly 3.6 billion dollars at the time, then the largest financial seizure in the department's history — from Ilya Lichtenstein and Heather Morgan, connected to the 2016 theft of 119,754 BTC from the Bitfinex exchange (Chainalysis). Both pleaded guilty in 2023; Lichtenstein was sentenced to five years and Morgan to eighteen months in November 2024, with total recoveries in the case reaching about 10 billion dollars in value (TRM Labs). Crucially, these coins are unlikely to stay in government hands: courts have treated Bitfinex as the victim entitled to restitution, and as of August 2026 the coins remained tied up in proceedings. CryptoSlate calculated that returning them could cut the headline US balance by nearly 30% without a single coin being sold.

The Prince Group forfeiture — the largest ever

In October 2025, the DOJ unsealed an indictment against Chen Zhi, chairman of Cambodia's Prince Group, over "pig butchering" investment-fraud compounds, and filed a civil forfeiture action against approximately 127,271 BTC — about 15 billion dollars at the time, the largest forfeiture action in DOJ history (CNBC). Chen Zhi remained at large as of the announcement. These coins are in US custody but, as of mid-2026, not finally forfeited — a distinction that drives much of the confusion over the US total, covered below.

The US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve

On March 6, 2025, Executive Order 14233 established the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a separate United States Digital Asset Stockpile for non-Bitcoin assets (Federal Register; White House text). The order's core mechanics:

The Treasury administers custodial accounts holding Bitcoin that has been finally forfeited to the federal government.
Bitcoin deposited into the Reserve is not to be sold — it is treated as a long-term reserve asset.
Treasury and Commerce were directed to develop budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional Bitcoin, meaning no new taxpayer cost.
Agencies were given 30 days to inventory their digital-asset holdings and Treasury 60 days to evaluate the legal framework.

Implementation since then has been slower and more opaque than the deadlines implied. A July 2025 White House digital-assets report said Treasury had delivered its evaluation internally, but as of August 2026 no agency-by-agency inventory had been published and it remained unclear how much eligible Bitcoin had actually been moved into Treasury-administered reserve accounts (CryptoSlate, August 2026).

How much does the US actually hold?

Estimates diverge sharply, and the divergence is instructive. When the Reserve was announced in March 2025, the White House crypto adviser cited roughly 200,000 BTC. As of July 2026, Arkham Intelligence tracked roughly 324,000 BTC in US-government-tagged wallets, while Bitcoin Treasuries listed 328,372 BTC — yet another commonly cited tracker still showed about 198,000 BTC, a gap of more than 130,000 BTC worth roughly 8 billion dollars at early-August 2026 prices (CryptoSlate). Most of the gap is the Prince Group seizure: some trackers count the 127,271 seized-but-contested BTC, others do not, because coins in custody pending forfeiture are legally different from coins the government owns. The Bitfinex ~94,000 BTC cuts the other way — counted today, but likely to leave via restitution. BTC Crawl's own US government entity page carries the figure as an estimate with these caveats, per our methodology.

Legislation: the BITCOIN Act and successors

Senator Cynthia Lummis's BITCOIN Act of 2025 (S.954), with a House companion from Representative Nick Begich, would codify the Reserve in statute and direct the acquisition of up to 1,000,000 BTC over five years using budget-neutral mechanisms (Lummis press release). As of August 2026 the act had not passed; in May 2026, a reworked successor — reported as the American Reserve Modernization Act (ARMA), described by supporters as a "version 2.0" of the BITCOIN Act with the same 1-million-BTC, five-year target — was introduced with bipartisan sponsors (Bitcoin Foundation news). Until something passes, the Reserve rests on an executive order that a future administration could revoke.

El Salvador: the purchaser

El Salvador is the only country that built a meaningful Bitcoin position primarily by buying it. It made Bitcoin legal tender in September 2021, began purchasing for the treasury the same month, and on November 17, 2022 started buying one Bitcoin every day. As of early August 2026, its disclosed reserve stood at roughly 7,700 BTC — around half a billion dollars at the time — making it the fifth-largest publicly disclosed sovereign holder (Bitcoin.com News).

The complication is the IMF. El Salvador's 1.4-billion-dollar December 2024 financing agreement included commitments to stop voluntary public-sector Bitcoin accumulation, and the country scaled back parts of the legal-tender framework. Yet the government's public tracker kept ticking up by about one BTC per day. The IMF's position, restated in 2025-2026 program reviews, is that no net new purchases have occurred since the program began — official data showed 5,968 BTC at the program's start in December 2024 — and that on-chain increases reflect wallet consolidation from existing government holdings rather than fresh buying (Yahoo Finance). Both narratives cannot be fully true, and neither side has forced the issue; the ambiguity itself is now part of the story. The IMF deal notably did not require selling existing holdings. Track the current figure on the El Salvador entity page.

Bhutan: the miner

Bhutan took a third path: its sovereign wealth arm, Druk Holding & Investments (DHI), quietly mined Bitcoin using surplus Himalayan hydropower, accumulating an on-chain stack that peaked around 13,000 BTC in October 2024 by Arkham's tagging. Since then, wallets attributed to Bhutan have shed roughly 70% of that position: about 3,954 BTC remained by April 2026, with CoinDesk reporting the country may also have wound down mining. Transfers continued into 2026 — over 237 million dollars moved out of tracked wallets in the first five months of the year, taking Arkham-tagged holdings to roughly 3,100 BTC by mid-May (CoinDesk, March 2026).

Then the twist: in May 2026, DHI officials said they did not recall selling any Bitcoin, directly disputing the widely tracked billion-dollar drawdown (CoinDesk, May 2026). Coins may have moved to custodians, been pledged, or been sold — outflows from tagged wallets are not proof of sales. Bhutan is the cleanest illustration of why on-chain estimates and official statements can point in opposite directions, and BTC Crawl records the figure as an estimate for exactly this reason: see the Bhutan (DHI) entity page.

The United Kingdom: the reluctant custodian

The UK holds one of the world's largest seized stockpiles almost by accident. In 2018, the Metropolitan Police seized devices holding about 61,000 BTC from a London property linked to Zhimin Qian, who had fled China after running an investment fraud that raised billions of yuan from tens of thousands of victims; Qian and an associate later pleaded guilty to money-laundering charges (Decrypt). By late 2025 the stash was worth several billion pounds, and the Home Office was reported to be working toward a sale (The Block). Disposal is contested: Chinese fraud victims, assisted by Chinese authorities, registered claims for recovery, and a High Court hearing on disposal was held on February 16-17, 2026 (Caproasia). As of August 2026 the coins had not been sold, and proposals ranged from victim compensation to retention as a UK reserve. Status and sources: UK government entity page.

China: the black box

China's position is the least knowable of any major government. In 2019, Chinese authorities broke up the PlusToken Ponzi scheme and seized a crypto haul that included roughly 194,000 BTC, which court documents said was "transferred to the national treasury" (CoinDesk, 2020). Whether any of it is still held is disputed: CryptoQuant's CEO and other on-chain analysts concluded the coins were routed through mixers and sold on exchanges as early as 2019 (The Crypto Basic), while some trackers continue to list China as the second-largest sovereign holder because no official disposal has ever been announced. There has been no confirmed update from Chinese regulators as of mid-2026. BTC Crawl lists China's figure as unverified for this reason — see the China entity page.

Germany 2024: the case study in selling

Germany is the clearest before-and-after case. In January 2024, prosecutors in Saxony took custody of nearly 50,000 BTC surrendered in the criminal case against the operators of movie2k, a piracy streaming site — then about 2.1 billion euros. Under German rules for assets at risk of significant value fluctuation, authorities conducted an "emergency sale": between June 19 and July 12, 2024, they sold 49,858 BTC in tranches for total proceeds of about 2.64 billion euros, an average of roughly 52,944 euros per coin (Blocktrainer). The selling pressure coincided with a notable market drawdown that summer, and within months Bitcoin traded far above the sale price — once Bitcoin crossed 104,000 dollars, Cointelegraph tallied roughly 2.35 billion dollars of foregone profit (Cointelegraph). Whatever one's view of the decision, it reset the policy debate: Germany's sale is now the reference point cited by both US reserve advocates (as the mistake to avoid) and by governments arguing seized assets should be liquidated promptly regardless of price. Germany's tracked holdings today are effectively zero.

US state-level Bitcoin reserves

Below the federal level, US states began writing Bitcoin reserves into law in 2025, and by mid-2026 more than 30 states had introduced some form of reserve or digital-asset investment bill (National Law Review). Three moved first:

New Hampshire — first in the nation. HB 302, signed in May 2025, authorizes the state treasurer to invest up to 5% of public funds in precious metals and digital assets with a market capitalization above 500 billion dollars — a threshold only Bitcoin meets — via qualified custody or exchange-traded products (Citizens Count).
Texas — first to fund and buy. SB 21, signed in June 2025, created a standalone Texas Strategic Bitcoin Reserve with a 10-million-dollar appropriation; the Comptroller executed the state's first purchase on November 20, 2025 — roughly 5 million dollars into BlackRock's IBIT ETF at a Bitcoin price of 91,336 dollars (CNBC, January 2026).
Arizona — the no-new-money model. HB 2749 created a Bitcoin and Digital Assets Reserve Fund seeded from unclaimed digital-asset property rather than taxpayer purchases (National Law Review).

The sums are small — Texas's initial buy is a rounding error next to any seizure discussed above — but the legal plumbing (custody rules, ETF authorization, appropriation mechanics) is the precedent other states are copying. A running tally of state programs is maintained by trackers such as Bitbo's state reserve tracker, and state activity feeds into the broader adoption picture on our adoption trends page.

How these estimates are made — and why they carry uncertainty

Almost no government publishes an audited Bitcoin balance. Nearly every number in this guide comes from on-chain intelligence: firms such as Arkham Intelligence cluster addresses using court documents, seizure transaction hashes, exchange interactions, and heuristics, then label wallet groups as "US Government," "Bhutan," and so on. This works far better for Bitcoin than for traditional reserve assets — the ledger is public — but it has structural limits:

Attribution is inference. A wallet is "government-owned" because analysts linked it to a seizure, not because the government said so. Coins moved to unlabeled custodians silently vanish from the total, which is one candidate explanation for the Bhutan dispute.
Outflows are not sales. Transfers to exchanges or custodians often precede sales, but can also be consolidation, custody migration, or collateral movement. El Salvador's IMF standoff turns on exactly this: the same on-chain activity reads as "daily buying" to one side and "wallet consolidation" to the other.
Seized is not owned. The 130,000-BTC spread between US trackers in July 2026 exists mostly because coins in custody pending forfeiture (Prince Group) or earmarked for victim restitution (Bitfinex) are counted by some trackers and excluded by others (CryptoSlate).
Partial disclosure misleads. In early 2025, a FOIA response covering only the US Marshals Service sparked reports that the US had sold 85% of its Bitcoin; Arkham showed at least 198,000 BTC were intact across other agencies (FBI, DOJ, IRS-CI) that do not routinely disclose balances (Crypto Economy).
Silence is not zero. China may hold 194,000 BTC or none; absence of on-chain evidence of holding is not evidence of sale, and vice versa.

BTC Crawl's approach follows from this: every government figure on this site is labeled an estimate, tied to a dated source, and marked verified only when it comes from a primary official disclosure. The full rules are on the methodology page.

Frequently asked questions

Which government holds the most Bitcoin?

The United States, on every tracker — with mid-2026 estimates ranging from about 198,000 BTC (finally forfeited and clearly government-controlled) to about 328,000 BTC (including contested seizures such as the 127,271 BTC Prince Group forfeiture). The honest answer is a range, not a number.

Did the US government buy any of its Bitcoin?

No. As of August 2026, the federal position consists entirely of seized and forfeited coins. Executive Order 14233 directs agencies to find budget-neutral ways to acquire more, and the BITCOIN Act and its reported ARMA successor would authorize up to 1,000,000 BTC in acquisitions, but no federal purchase had been confirmed.

Is El Salvador still buying Bitcoin every day?

Its government tracker still shows the reserve growing by about one BTC per day, reaching roughly 7,700 BTC by August 2026. The IMF, however, maintains that no net new purchases have occurred since its December 2024 program began and attributes the on-chain growth to consolidation of existing holdings. The two accounts remain unreconciled.

Why did Germany sell its 50,000 BTC?

German law allows an "emergency sale" of seized assets subject to significant value fluctuation before a case concludes. Saxony's prosecutors applied that rule to the movie2k coins in mid-2024, selling 49,858 BTC for about 2.64 billion euros. It was a legal-procedure decision, not an investment call — which is precisely why it became a policy case study.

Are these figures audited?

Almost never. El Salvador publishes a tracker and Texas discloses its ETF purchase, but the large seizure-derived positions (US, UK, China) rest on court filings plus on-chain analysis. Treat every figure as an estimate with a date attached.

Government Bitcoin Reserves: The Complete Guide