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The U.S. president directed his administration to establish a bitcoin reserve to hold assets the U.S. has seized, and it's setting up a separate crypto stockpile.
Mar 7, 2025, 12:34 a.m. UTC
President Donald Trump has directed his administration to establish a Bitcoin Strategic Reserve to hold the assets that have been seized by the government, and he's additionally called for a crypto stockpile of other types of assets.
At this point, all of the assets contemplated by the order would be those seized in civil or criminal forfeitures. The bitcoin will be stored for long-term value in what was termed a "digital Fort Knox."
"The Reserve will be capitalized with Bitcoin owned by the federal government that was forfeited as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings," said David Sacks, Trump's crypto czar, in a statement posted on social media site X.
In a video showing the president signing the order, Trump says about establishing the reserve, "Made the promise, right?"
The order has also nudged government officials to seek ways to add more bitcoin to the reserve, as long as it doesn't harm the federal budget.
"The Secretaries of Treasury and Commerce are authorized to develop budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies have no incremental costs on American taxpayers," Sacks said.
Jesse Hamilton
Jesse Hamilton is CoinDesk's deputy managing editor on the Global Policy and Regulation team, based in Washington, D.C. Before joining CoinDesk in 2022, he worked for more than a decade covering Wall Street regulation at Bloomberg News and Businessweek, writing about the early whisperings among federal agencies trying to decide what to do about crypto. He’s won several national honors in his reporting career, including from his time as a war correspondent in Iraq and as a police reporter for newspapers. Jesse is a graduate of Western Washington University, where he studied journalism and history. He has no crypto holdings.
