With the end of three decades of uninterrupted rule by the Democratic Party of Socialists, DPS, in 2020, Spajic became finance minister that year and promised a raft of regulation that he said would turn the country into a “crypto paradise”.

In 2022, the government granted citizenship to Vitalik Buterin, co-founder of the Ethereum blockchain and a guru in crypto circles, while Spajic claimed that the cryptocurrency industry could grow to account for a third of national economic output by 2025.

In January 2021, BIRN reported that Spajic, then finance minister, had declared ownership of Bitcoin with a market value of 150,000 euros, without specifying how much Bitcoin he owned.

In his regular annual report submitted in March 2021,…