The latest Nobel Peace Prize winner is a Bitcoin supporter

The winner of the 2025 Nobel Peace Prize, Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado, appears to be a Bitcoiner.

Machado, 58, who was promised the price on Friday, last year talked about how Bitcoin has become an ‘essential means of resistance’ for many people in the country.

Speak with Bitcoin MagazineMachado said that the asset has long been used by people in the country to get around a collapsing economy, and that the opposition was looking forward to embracing the oldest cryptocurrency “in a new democratic Venezuela.”

“This financial repression – rooted in state-sponsored looting, theft and uncontrolled money printing – occurred despite our best, vast natural resources, and despite an oil price boom that peaked at $147 in July 2008,” she said in the September 2024 interview.

“Some Venezuelans found a lifeline in Bitcoin during hyperinflation,” she continued. “[Bitcoin] has evolved from a humanitarian instrument to an essential means of resistance.”

“We see Bitcoin as part of our national reserves, helping to rebuild what the dictatorship has stolen,” she added.

Major crypto industry figures revealed the year-old interview following news of Machado’s win – and celebrated the move.

“For the first time in history, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to a Bitcoiner,” Jeff Park, Chief Investment Officer of ProCap, wrote on X.

Bradley Rettler, director of the Bitcoin Research Institute at the University of Wyoming, added: “I’m thrilled to see that Nobel Prize winner María Corina Machado understands Bitcoin as resistance money.”

The Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded Machado the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday for “her tireless work to promote democratic rights for the people of Venezuela, and for her struggle to achieve a just and peaceful transition from dictatorship to democracy.”

Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, who has been president since 2013 and has ruled the country with an iron fist, has barred Machado from running in the 2024 presidential elections. After Maduro’s victory, international observers said the elections were not democratic.

Venezuelans do long used cryptocurrencies as a way to avoid out-of-control prices. A toxic combination of government currency controls, corruption and US sanctions led to the Venezuelan bolivar collapsing almost a decade ago.

The country still suffers from one of the highest inflation rates in the world, but the South American country is now largely – informally – in dollars.