President Donald Trump on Thursday night authorized the creation of a strategic bitcoin reserve and a separate US stockpile of other digital assets, fulfilling a campaign promise he made to an industry that is gathering at the White House Friday for a “crypto summit.”
The bitcoin reserve will be seeded with bitcoin already owned by the federal government taken as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings, Trump’s crypto czar David Sacks said in a post on the social media platform X.
“This means it will not cost taxpayers a dime,” Sacks said. Trump in the Oval Office asked Sacks if he believed in the reserve and then before signing the executive order said “we made the promise” — referring to the pledge of a bitcoin reserve he made on the 2024 campaign trail.
Sacks said on X that the U.S. government owns an estimated 200,000 bitcoin (BTC-USD), although he said there has never been a complete audit. An executive order signed by Trump Thursday asks for a full accounting of the federal government’s digital asset holdings.
Sacks said the U.S. will not sell any bitcoin once it is in the reserve and that it will be kept as a store of value.
The reserve, he added, “is like a digital Fort Knox for the cryptocurrency often called ‘digital gold.’”
As to whether the US may buy more bitcoin to bolster the reserve, Sacks noted that the secretaries of Treasury and Commerce have the authorization “to develop budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies have no incremental costs on American taxpayers.”
Sen. Cynthia Lummis has separately discussed a US government crypto-buying program that would call for the Federal Reserve to purchase more bitcoin using 1970s-era certificates for gold reserves. It would need congressional approval.
“The goal of a strategic reserve is to buy or convert current assets into bitcoin and then hold them … that way, we can remove the short-term volatility from the equation and look at this as a long-term strategic asset,” she told Yahoo Finance Live in an interview last Friday.
Lummis said there is more work to do to help people understand “the reason why we should have it” and that it can interplay with the world reserve currency status of the US dollar.
“We think they are very complimentary,” Lummis told Yahoo Finance.
When the president last weekend floated the idea of a reserve on social media, he said it would include bitcoin as well as other digital assets: ethereum (ETH), XRP (XRP), solana (SOL), and cardano (ADA).
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