Bhutan's sovereign investment arm, Druk Holding & Investments, moved 319 BTC worth approximately $22.7 million to exchanges on April 9, according to Arkham Intelligence. The transfer is the latest in an 18-month liquidation that has reduced the country's Bitcoin reserves by roughly 70%, from a peak of about 13,000 BTC in October 2024 to approximately 3,654 BTC as of April 11, 2026.
The selling has been quiet. Bhutanese authorities have issued no public statements about the drawdown. Everything known about the pattern comes from on-chain tracking by Arkham, which has linked the wallets to the Royal Government of Bhutan and Druk Holding.
A Stack Built on Glacial Rivers, Not Tax Seizures
Most sovereign Bitcoin holdings exist because a government seized them. The United States holds an estimated 198,000 BTC from criminal forfeitures. The United Kingdom holds roughly 61,000 BTC from a single 2018 fraud case. Bhutan is different. It built its entire stack from scratch.
In 2019, Druk Holding launched a state-backed mining operation powered by surplus hydroelectric capacity. Bhutan generates far more electricity than its 780,000 residents consume, thanks to a network of run-of-river dams fed by Himalayan glaciers. The excess power had been exported to India at thin margins. Routing some of it into Bitcoin mining created a higher-value use case.
The result was a Bitcoin treasury with an effective cost basis near zero. Every coin mined with surplus hydro is profit at any sale price above the marginal electricity cost, which for Bhutan is among the lowest in the world.
The Liquidation Curve
The selling started slowly. In late 2024 and early 2025, Druk Holding moved small tranches of $5 million to $10 million per month. By March 2026, the pace had accelerated to weekly batches exceeding $35 million. Between March 17 and 18, a single cluster of transactions moved 973 BTC, roughly $72 million, across multiple addresses.
In total, more than 9,000 BTC have left the government's tracked wallets since October 2024. Of the $215 million moved in 2026 alone, about $162 million went to unlabeled wallets, with the remainder routed to exchanges including OKX and Galaxy Digital.
In March alone, Bhutan transferred over 1,667 BTC valued at approximately $120 million. The April 9 transfer of 319 BTC represented about 6.3% of remaining reserves.
Where the Money Is Going
Bhutanese officials have not confirmed the purpose of the sales, but the timing aligns with the country's most ambitious infrastructure project: Gelephu Mindfulness City.
Gelephu is a planned special administrative region in southern Bhutan, near the Indian border. The government has described it as an economic hub designed to attract foreign investment, with its own regulatory framework and tax incentives. Previous reports indicated that Bhutan had pledged to allocate 10,000 BTC toward the project's development. The current sell-off, if directed at Gelephu, would represent the monetization of that pledge.
For a country with a GDP of about $2.8 billion, converting 9,000 BTC into hard currency for infrastructure spending is a material fiscal event. The total value liquidated since October 2024 likely exceeds $600 million at average sale prices during that period, though the exact realized proceeds depend on execution timing.
What Remains
Despite the 70% drawdown, Bhutan still holds roughly 3,654 BTC, worth about $266 million at BTC's current price of $72,828 as of April 11, 2026. That keeps the country among the top five nation-state Bitcoin holders globally, behind the United States, United Kingdom, El Salvador, and the United Arab Emirates.
The remaining stack is small enough that further sales at the current pace would fully deplete it within a few months. Whether Druk Holding intends to hold a residual reserve or liquidate entirely is unknown.
The Sovereign Mining Model in Retrospect
Bhutan's experiment tested a simple thesis: a country with cheap, stranded energy can mine Bitcoin and convert it into national wealth. By that measure, it worked. The mining operation produced thousands of coins at near-zero marginal cost, and the government is now spending the proceeds on physical infrastructure.
But the model also reveals a constraint. Sovereign mining generates Bitcoin, not a perpetual revenue stream. Once the coins are sold, the treasury is gone unless the country continues mining at scale to replenish it. Bhutan's hydropower capacity has not expanded enough to sustain both mining and the country's growing domestic electricity demand.
El Salvador, the other prominent sovereign Bitcoin holder, faces a different version of the same question. It bought its coins on the open market rather than mining them, which means it carries price risk that Bhutan largely avoided. Both countries now hold Bitcoin as a strategic reserve, but neither has published a clear policy on when or why they would sell.
For retail holders watching sovereign sell-offs, the practical concern is supply pressure. Bhutan's 319 BTC on April 9 is small relative to daily exchange volume, but a pattern of weekly multi-hundred-BTC transfers to OKX and Galaxy Digital adds a persistent trickle of sell-side liquidity that did not exist a year ago.
Overview
Bhutan has sold roughly 70% of its Bitcoin reserves, reducing holdings from approximately 13,000 BTC to 3,654 BTC over 18 months. The coins were mined using surplus hydroelectric power starting in 2019, giving the country a near-zero cost basis. Proceeds are believed to be funding the Gelephu Mindfulness City infrastructure project. Despite the drawdown, Bhutan remains a top-five sovereign Bitcoin holder. The latest transfer, 319 BTC on April 9, was routed to exchanges including OKX and Galaxy Digital.
