According to data from the Opendatabot website, officials in Ukraine hold a total of 46,351 Bitcoin, which translates into a worth of more than 75 billion hryvnias ($2.66 billion) at the current price.
Of course, Bitcoin isn’t the only crypto owned by Ukrainian state employees, as the report also mentions Ethereum, Litecoin, Cardano, Stellar, Bitcoin Cash, Bitcoin Gold, and IOTA.
Most of these crypto-holding state employees work in city councils, the Ministry of Defense, and for the National Police, according to data from the website. A smaller percentage of them work in the prosecutor’s office and village councils across the country.
Mishalov Vyacheslav Dmitrovich, a Deputy from the Dnipro City Council, is the official with the highest amount of BTC owned, as he holds 18,000 BTC currently.
Mykhailo Fedorov, the Minister of Digital Transformation, has reacted to the news with praise, saying that the country’s officials are becoming more “progressive and far-sighted investors than we thought.”
But not everybody was happy by the fact that the report was made public.
The head of the Mandatory Inspections Department at the National Agency for Prevention of Corruption, Sergiy Putukhov, declared that his office had made over 250 checks this year, including Bitcoin’s holdings state employees. He mentioned that some of the officials maintained that their filings had mistakes.
“If we find that the information provided about the possession of cryptocurrency is inaccurate – this is the basis for administrative or criminal liability.”