VanEck, the global wealth management firm, has claimed that 13 sovereign nations are now mining Bitcoin. Matthew Sigel, the head of digital assets research at VenEck briefly touched the topic during an interview on Thursday.
In conversation with CNBC, Sigel said many governments are using a portion of their energy production towards the mining of Bitcoin. As per Sigel, this outlines the visible shift in the outlook of international governments towards Bitcoin — that was once, not long ago, was seen as a speculative asset.
Sigel has said mining Bitcoin has started giving governments the essence of having some monetary sovereignty.
BTC mining is essentially the process of adding new blocks to the Bitcoin blockchain. The energy intensive process requires complex algorithm to be solved on advanced computers for validators (miners) to add new blocks to the chain. The miners churn rewards in return.
If governments have started to focus on BTC mining, it marks a major pivot in establishing BTC from a private-sector experiment to strategic crypto adoption.
Sigel did not list the 13 countries in his brief mention of the situation. El Salvador and Bhutan are definitely on the list of nations mining BTC owing to the bounty of nature in these regions.
Other regions that are supporting BTC mining reportedly include Oman, UAE, Kazakhstan, China, Russia, Germany, and Malaysia.
Bitcoin’s mining difficulty has fallen by 11 percent in 2025. marking its largest drop since China’s 2021 crackdown. The decline comes as miners struggle amid plummeting Bitcoin prices and extreme winter storms in the U.S., which disrupted mining operations.