President Donald Trump has signed an executive order to establish a strategic reserve for Bitcoin, making the US one of the few countries in the world to create a national stockpile of blockchain assets.
The reserve will hold cryptocurrency forfeited to the federal government as part of criminal or civil proceedings, White House AI and crypto tsar David Sacks said in a post on X.
The US will not sell any Bitcoin deposited in the reserve, said Sacks, and will instead keep it as an asset.
In 2021 El Salvador became the first country in the world to establish a Bitcoin reserve. Brazil, Japan and Switzerland have also debated such a step.
Trump – who just four years ago said Bitcoin “seems like a scam” – revealed plans earlier this week to make the US “the Crypto Capital of the World”.
Further details are expected when the president is due to host the first crypto summit at the White House on Friday.
It is unclear whether the planned reserve could face legal hurdles, or if it might require an act of Congress.
Sacks said the stockpile would serve as “a digital Fort Knox for the cryptocurrency”, drawing comparison to a Kentucky military base that stores a significant portion of US gold assets.
Trump’s order also creates a digital assets stockpile for cryptocurrencies other than Bitcoin that have been forfeited.
It directs a full accounting of the federal government’s crypto reserves, which Sacks said are estimated at 200,000 Bitcoin alone. That’s worth $17.5bn (£13.6bn) at today’s prices.
It was unclear how the new stockpile would benefit Americans, but Sacks said it “will not cost taxpayers a dime”.
His implication that the US government would not buy Bitcoin led prices of the world’s largest cryptocurrency to fall by more than 5%.
Some countries maintain strategic reserves of national assets to diversify government holdings and hedge against financial risk.
The US also keeps a petroleum reserve. Canada has a maple syrup reserve.
Earlier this week, Trump revealed the names of five cryptocurrencies that he said he would like included in the strategic reserve.
The market prices of the five coins he named – Bitcoin, Ethereum, XRP, Solana and Cardano – swiftly jumped after that announcement.
Trump aggressively courted the crypto community during his presidential campaign. Former US President Joe Biden led a crackdown on crypto, citing concerns about fraud.
