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 (BTC-USD) already owned by the federal government that was 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. Before signing the executive order in the Oval Office, Trump asked Sacks if he believed in the reserve and then 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 US government owns an estimated 200,000 bitcoins after selling off about half of what it acquired through criminal seizures, although he said there has never been a complete audit.
Had the government not sold that sum for roughly $360 million over the last decade, according to White House officials, its bitcoin holdings would potentially be worth $17 billion.
Sacks said the US 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.’”
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-creates-bitcoin-reserve-ahead-of-white-house-crypto-summit-090057235.html 