Paraguay's Central Bank Now Counts Bitcoin Mining as a Services Export

Sponsored contribution from HIVE Digital Technologies. Frank Holmes is HIVE's Executive Chairman.

Paraguay just did something almost no government has done. Its central bank built cryptomining directly into national accounts. Not a policy statement. Not a press conference. A change to the actual methodology used to measure the size of the economy.

This matters because of what it signals, not just what it says. Countries don't formally measure activities they intend to restrict. They measure what they intend to grow. Paraguay's central bank just told the world, in the most boring and most credible way possible, through statistical methodology, that mining is infrastructure now. Permanent. Countable. Real.

HERE'S THE ACTUAL DATA

Paraguay adopted the new 2025 global System of National Accounts standard, and it is one of the first countries anywhere to apply it to cryptomining. Inside the telecommunications sector, mining already accounts for more than 10% of gross output. Not 10% of GDP. Ten percent of an entire national industry, moved by an activity that barely existed a decade ago.

And critically, it's booked as a services export. That's not semantics. That's the state formally classifying mined Bitcoin as Paraguay selling something to the world.

ENERGY LEAVES AS CAPITAL

Think about what that really means. Paraguay has abundant hydroelectric power that used to be sold cheap, exported, or simply wasted. Now that same power runs machines that convert electricity into a globally liquid, dollar-denominated asset, and the government counts it the same way it counts beef or soybeans leaving the country. Energy that once left as a commodity now leaves as capital.

ONE FLYWHEEL, NOT FOUR BETS

This is exactly the thesis HIVE has been building on for years. Stranded power becomes Bitcoin. Bitcoin becomes balance sheet strength. That same energy backbone becomes AI compute. Compute becomes sovereign infrastructure: hospitals, schools, national capability.

It's not four separate bets. It's one flywheel, and Paraguay's central bank just put an official government stamp on step one.

THE OPERATORS ON THE GROUND

We are not reading about this from the outside. HIVE and BUZZ are already operating in Paraguay, already in the room with the people who wrote this policy. When a government formalizes an industry in its books, the operators already on the ground get the advantage. That's us.

Energy used to be a resource you sold cheap and hoped for the best. Now it's an export line item with global demand behind it. That shift just became official. We're not spectators. We're building on it.