One of the contenders for the post of director of the National Anti-Corruption Bureau of Ukraine, Vitaliy Vlasyuk, earned a significant portion of his capital from mining cryptocurrencies. The outlet «Судово-юридична газета» reported this.
During the interview with the screening commission Vlasyuk said that since 2017 he has been mining various cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin, Bitcoin Cash and Ethereum.
“We have different equipment. In April 2017 each device cost about $1,000. Then we sold them for $4,000 each. And then the price of Bitcoin rose from $1,000 to $9,000. We played with it and earned,”
For monthly electricity consumption in November 2020, Vlasyuk paid 25,000 hryvnias. The equipment was partly kept in a garage and in other places, as it could also be used as a heating system. The running costs of the devices amounted to around 20,000-25,000 hryvnias per month.
According to commission members, the lack of documents for the lease of premises and for the equipment allows “to formally legitimise the receipt of any income.” However, Vlasyuk countered that mining in Ukraine is not regulated at present, so the matter should be handled by the relevant state authorities.
Overall, according to him, the income from cryptocurrency mining in 2020 amounted to about 3 million hryvnias, from which he paid 5% tax on the profits.
According to the declaration, Vlasyuk owns about 10.18 BTC. He valued them at 1 million hryvnias. However, according to calculations by anti-corruption experts, the real market value of these assets as of December 31, 2021 was about 13 million hryvnias.
Vlasyuk stored assets on exchanges and in cold wallets. He declined to provide a full list of transactions, saying he had “millions of such operations.”
“There is equipment that generates these Bitcoins. It drips a little every day into one account. Then on some days I withdraw them and transfer them to a cold wallet,” Vlasyuk explained the inaccuracies in the declaration in комментарии “Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty”.
He could not name the public wallet address, allegedly because “he doesn’t know it.” The last transaction on Vlasyuk’s wallet was recorded in April 2021.
As Bitcoin Magazine Ukraine reports, participants in the bitcoin-millionaire ranking collectively own about 47 000 BTC на сумму $1 млрд.