On Thursday evening, President Donald Trump gave the green light for establishing a strategic bitcoin reserve alongside a separate U.S. stockpile of various digital assets, fulfilling a commitment made during his campaign to an industry gathering at the White House on Friday for a “crypto summit.”
According to David Sacks, Trump’s crypto czar, the bitcoin reserve will be initially funded using bitcoin already held by the federal government, which was obtained through criminal or civil asset forfeiture processes, as he stated on the social media platform X.
“This means that taxpayers won’t bear any costs,” Sacks remarked. Trump reportedly asked Sacks in the Oval Office if he supported the reserve and stated, “we made the promise” before signing the executive order, alluding to his earlier promise of a bitcoin reserve during the 2024 campaign.
Sacks also indicated on X that the U.S. government possesses roughly 200,000 bitcoin (BTC-USD), although he mentioned that a comprehensive audit had never been conducted. An executive order signed by Trump on Thursday requests a thorough accounting of the federal government’s digital asset holdings.
He noted that once the bitcoin is in the reserve, the U.S. government will not sell it; rather, it will be maintained as a store of value.
The reserve has been described as “a digital Fort Knox for cryptocurrency” and is often referred to as ‘digital gold.’
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The Washington Post via Getty Images
Regarding the possibility of the U.S. acquiring more bitcoin to enhance the reserve, Sacks indicated that the Treasury and Commerce Secretaries have the authority “to devise budget-neutral strategies for acquiring more bitcoin, as long as those strategies do not incur additional costs for American taxpayers.”
Senator Cynthia Lummis has proposed a separate U.S. government crypto purchasing initiative that would involve the Federal Reserve buying more bitcoin using gold reserve certificates from the 1970s, which would require congressional approval.
“The objective of a strategic reserve is to purchase or convert existing assets into bitcoin and retain them … in this way, we can eliminate short-term volatility and view it as a long-term strategic asset,” she explained during an interview on Yahoo Finance Live last Friday.
Lummis expressed that additional efforts are needed to help the public understand “the rationale behind having it” and its potential relationship with the U.S. dollar’s status as the world’s reserve currency.
“We believe they are very complementary,” Lummis added during her discussion with Yahoo Finance.
When the president proposed the reserve idea on social media last weekend, he mentioned that it would encompass bitcoin as well as several other digital assets: ethereum (ETH), XRP (XRP), solana (SOL), and cardano (ADA).
