CEO of CryptoQuant—Ki Young Ju—recently took to Twitter to share a “fun fact.” The executive of the on-chain data and analytics platform claimed that the Government of China was a “crypto whale.” He said,
“Chinese authorities seized 194k BTC, 833k ETH, and others from the PlusToken scam in 2019. They forfeited these $6 billion-worth assets to the national treasury.“
The PlusToken scam, was a Ponzi scheme that manipulated investors by proposing to them high and risk-free returns. With over two-and-a-half million investors enticed, the scam was systematically cataloged into around 3,200 levels. The perpetrators typically used fresh investments to pay back their initial investors, maintaining the essence of the Ponzi scheme.
The police crackdown on the PlusToken Ponzi scheme that followed resulted in cryptos worth billions of dollars being seized. The court document listed 194,775 BTC, 833,083 ETH, 487 million XRP, 79,581 BCH, 1.4 million LTC, 27.6 million EOS, 74,167 DASH, 6 billion DOGE, and 213,724 USDT.
The seizure of the aforementioned number of BTC puts China ahead of MicroStrategy—the firm HODLing the largest number of coins. For what it’s worth, Ki Young Ju highlighted that the said company possessed 130k BTC.
Plot Twist: Did the government sell Bitcoins?
The CryptoQuant executive went on to further state that Bulgaria “might” have more than 200k Bitcoins. Per the Southeast European Law Enforcement Center, Bulgarian authorities found BTC worth around $500 million in 2017. Around twenty-three Bulgarian nationals were arrested during the operation, and officials said at the time that the arrests and subsequent asset seizures followed an investigation into an alleged customs fraud scam.
Nevertheless, it is not clear if the Prosecutor’s Office ended up confiscating and seizing the crypto as evidence.
Ki Young Ju further pointed out that in countries accepting Bitcoin as an asset for payment, the governments usually exchange the seized HODLings for fiat and forfeit them to the national treasury. China’s stance towards crypto, however, remains to be hostile, especially after last year’s crackdown.
The Chinese Communist Party, on their part, has also not clarified if they still HODL the seized crypto assets not. Owing to the macro turmoil, prices of most assets have slashed down to their multi-month lows, and perhaps that’s why Ki Young Ju concluded the thread by exclaiming, “Hope they finished selling.”