Bitcoin is on track to becoming a reserve asset in the U.S. under President Donald Trump’s pro-crypto administration. White House Executive Director Patrick Witt, during a recent media interview, said that an announcement around the strategic BTC reserve plan is expected soon by the White House.
During the interview, this strategic BTC reserve idea was called the “forgotten stepchild” caught in the noise of other crypto regulations like the GENIUS Act and the CLARITY Act.
While Witt did not reveal too much about this upcoming announcement, he did say that discussions around this initiative have been going on internally all this while.
“CLARITY was dominating all the headlines, sucking up all the oxygen in the room. But there’s still work going on behind the scenes. We never put it down. We never stopped working on it,” Witt said.
Trump floated idea of crypto strategic reserve
In March last year, President Trump said that the U.S. should see high value digital assets like Bitcoin and Ether as potential reserve assets. At the time, the Trump administration was trying to position itself as a pro-crypto government, opposed to former President Joe Biden’s tenure that infamously scrutanized the crypto sector driving big crypto firms like Binacne off-shore.
In an executive order signed by President Trump in March 2025, he announced that crypto assets like BTC confiscated from criminal case investigations would be put aside into a digital assets stockpile.
Under the order, BTC tokens that had been seized by the U.S. government through law enforcement forfeitures up until that point were also going to be added to the planned strategic BTC reserve. At first, President Trump’s idea was to not acquire any new BTC from the taxpayers’ money, however, the idea was soon expanded to load up the BTC reserve with a million tokens by pro-crypto regulators.
In the last few months, the proposal has witnessed major pushback from the Congress. As per reports, the Congress is not on board with setting the million token target for setting up the strategic BTC reserve, especially because the asset has consistently shown signs of volatility owing to geo-political tensions, financial ups and downs, and changing industrial winds.
Democrat politicians including Representative Maxine Waters and Senator Gary Connolly have repeatedly critized the plan. Last year, Waters had claimed that President Trump’s idea to create this strategic BTC and crypto reserves would benefit him as he already held these assets and was looking to capitalize on the government’s involvement – not the average person.
“If the government wants to hold assets, then it should be assets that benefit the economy and American families. Crypto has no inherent value, nor will it help with our national defense,” Waters had claimed. “The Administration should instead work with Congress to establish robust guardrails and oversight for the very crypto assets Trump seeks to stockpile, so that we can root out the fraud and abuse that has damaged the industry and scammed our nation’s hard-working investors out of billions of dollars.”
Experts warn of regulatory challenges between TradFi and DeFi
Additionally, American economists and watchdogs have raised red flags against the U.S. government’s intention of holding a substantial percentage of the BTC supply. Analysts have often argued that while the action would pose threat to the decentralized element of BTC’s ecosystem, It would complicate regulatory oversight on the merger of DeFi with traditional finance.
It has been a while since President Trump has also revisted this national BTC reserve plan on a public forum. Last year, stablecoin-focussed GENUIS Act took the spotlight and this year, all eyes are on the U.S. crypto market structure bill also called the CLARITY Act.
“These assets have to be safeguarded, they are unique. It’s going to require the government to do this in a bit of a different way, and obviously take it very, very seriously, because we have more of these assets on the balance sheet,” Witt added.
Following President Trump’s proposal of storing seized crypto in as a stockpile for long-term holdings, other nations like Brazil, El Salvador, Pakistan, and Bhutan joined the BTC reserve wave. However, regions like South Korea, the U.K., and the EU among other crypto-skeptic nations explicitly rejected the idea citing extreme price volatility and threat to traditional financial ecosystems.