From Contraband to Cash Flow? Paraguay To Mine Bitcoin With 30,000 Seized Rigs

Paraguay’s state‑owned electricity monopoly, Administración Nacional de Electricidad (ANDE), has signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with infrastructure firm Morphware to launch a government‑run Bitcoin mining program powered by thousands of confiscated mining machines and surplus hydroelectric power.

In a first‑of‑its‑kind move, Paraguay state power company is about to become a Bitcoin miner. ANDE has signed a formal agreement with Morphware to to build a state‑run mining program that uses two things the country already has in abundance: seized mining rigs and cheap hydroelectric power from the Itaipú dam.

In practice, ANDE will host and own the mining operations. Instead of exporting that energy at low, treaty‑defined prices, the utility will route part of it into Bitcoin mining facilities it controls. Morphware will act as a technical advisor rather than a speculative partner: according to Morphware founder and CEO Kenso Trabing, because ANDE has no experience mining Bitcoin, the company’s role will be “an advisory one.

The pilot phase will plug in about 1,500 seized miners at existing utility buildings located next to substations, which can be converted into basic mining facilities with ventilation, transformers, distribution units, and proper metering.

This decision follows a series of nationwide raids since early 2024, as ANDE moved against unmetered and fraudulent high‑voltage connections used by illegal miners.  Most of the machines going into this program were seized between May and June 2024, when authorities intensified inspections in mining hotspots.

In Salto del Guairá alone, ANDE confiscated 2,738 mining rigs after detecting an unmetered high‑load connection worth roughly 1.1 billion guaraníes (around 146,000 dollars) in stolen power every month, alongside dozens of similar operations that pushed the total stockpile of seized ASICs close to 30,000 units.

Paraguay’s move slots into a small but growing group of states that appear to be trying to turn energy policy into hash rate. El Salvador has already folded Bitcoin into its official toolkit, pointing geothermal power from state‑run plants into mining facilities and adding those coins to a government‑controlled BTC stockpile alongside its “volcano bond” ambitions, as reported by our sister website Bitcoinist. Further east, Bhutan’s sovereign wealth fund has quietly operated hydro‑powered mining since at least 2019, using surplus electricity from its dams to accumulate Bitcoin on the kingdom’s balance sheet and, more recently, to back new digital‑asset and “mindfulness city” projects.

Paraguay’s ANDE–Morphware experiment is the hydro‑rich, Latin American version of that same playbook: keep the energy domestic, own the infrastructure, and let the state, not just private miners, capture the upside.

Cover image from ChatGPT, BTCUSD chart from Tradingview