Strategic Bitcoin Reserve: How the US Government Became a Bitcoin Holder

On 6 March 2025 President Donald Trump signed Executive Order 14233, and the United States government became, on paper, one of the largest long-term holders of bitcoin in the world. The order created a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and told federal agencies to stop doing what they had done for a decade with seized coins: selling them.

The scale of the old habit was the selling point. David Sacks, the White House adviser on crypto and artificial intelligence, said that day that the government had sold about 195,000 bitcoins over the years for roughly $366 million, and that those coins would have been worth more than $17 billion if it had kept them. The new reserve would be, in his words, a "digital Fort Knox".

What the order actually does

Bitcoin is digital money with a fixed supply of 21 million coins, traded around the clock on exchanges, which work like stockbrokers for crypto. The US government never set out to own any. It acquired them the way it acquires seized cars and houses: through criminal and civil forfeiture, when courts rule that property came from crime. The biggest piles came from the Silk Road drug market, the 2016 hack of the exchange Bitfinex and a long list of fraud cases. The US Marshals Service, which disposes of seized property, used to auction them. In 2014 the venture capitalist Tim Draper bought about 30,000 Silk Road coins in one sale.

Executive Order 14233 changed the rule. Bitcoin that the Treasury holds through forfeiture goes into the reserve and "shall not be sold". Other seized tokens go into a separate Digital Asset Stockpile. Each agency had 30 days to report what it held and whether it could transfer it. The Treasury and Commerce Departments were told to find "budget-neutral" ways to acquire more bitcoin, meaning ways that cost taxpayers nothing. Coins owed to crime victims can still be returned, and courts can still order transfers.

The obvious comparison is the Strategic Petroleum Reserve, the emergency oil store kept in salt caverns on the Gulf Coast. The difference is that oil has a use in a crisis. Bitcoin's value to a government is a bet that the price will keep rising.

How many coins, and who counts them

No one outside the government knows exactly how much is in the reserve. The order asked for an internal accounting, not a public audit. When it was signed, the tracking site BitcoinTreasuries put federal holdings at about 198,000 BTC. Of those, about 94,600 came from the Bitfinex hack, and prosecutors had asked a court in January 2025 to return them to the exchange, so a large share of the headline number may never be the government's to keep.

The pile grew sharply in October 2025. On 14 October federal prosecutors in Brooklyn charged Chen Zhi, the chairman of Cambodia's Prince Group, with wire fraud and money laundering conspiracy, accusing him of running forced-labour scam compounds. A companion civil forfeiture complaint targeted about 127,271 bitcoin, then worth about $15 billion, the largest forfeiture action in Justice Department history. The analytics firm Elliptic linked the coins to a 2020 theft from LuBian, a Chinese bitcoin mining pool, and China has disputed the American account of how the US obtained them. Chen was arrested in Cambodia in January 2026 and sent to China, out of reach of the US case. The forfeiture claim was still pending in October 2026.

With those coins, trackers put the government's holdings at between about 319,000 and 328,000 BTC in early October 2026, worth roughly $26 billion to $28 billion at about $82,000 a coin. The estimates differ because trackers disagree about which wallets belong to which agency.

The custody record is not reassuring. In January 2026 the blockchain investigator ZachXBT reported that John Daghita, the son of the head of a company contracted to help the Marshals manage seized crypto, could move funds from government wallets. The FBI arrested Daghita on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin in March 2026, accusing him of stealing more than $46 million in seized cryptocurrency. He has not been convicted.

The buying that never started

Trump first promised a "strategic national bitcoin stockpile" at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville in July 2024, and pledged that the government would keep all the bitcoin it held. Days later Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming introduced the BITCOIN Act, which would have had the Treasury buy one million bitcoin over five years, about 200,000 a year. It never came to a vote.

On 14 August 2025 Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox Business the government was "not going to be buying" bitcoin for the reserve and would build it from confiscated assets. Bitcoin fell from about $121,000 to under $119,000 within the hour. Later that day Bessent wrote on X that the Treasury was still exploring budget-neutral ways to acquire more.

In April 2026, at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas, Patrick Witt, executive director of the President's Council of Advisers on Digital Assets, promised a "big announcement" within weeks. In May he said the administration had cleared a legal hurdle. On 21 May 2026 Representatives Nick Begich of Alaska and Jared Golden of Maine introduced the American Reserve Modernization Act, known as ARMA. It would write the reserve into law, bar any sale for 20 years and require quarterly, publicly audited proof of the coins held. Reports said it dropped the one-million-coin purchase target. It sits with the House Financial Services Committee and has not passed.

Some states moved faster. New Hampshire passed the first state law allowing its treasurer to hold bitcoin in May 2025. Texas created its own reserve in June 2025 and in November 2025 bought about $5 million of BlackRock's bitcoin fund, a share listed on the stock market that tracks the bitcoin price.

Coins on the move

In the first week of October 2026, wallets labelled as US government holdings moved more than a billion dollars of bitcoin. Galaxy Research counted about 9,261 BTC, roughly $770 million, sent to Coinbase Prime, the institutional arm of the largest US crypto exchange, on 6 and 7 October, and a further 12,267 BTC from a Bitfinex-linked wallet to new addresses on 8 October. The analytics service Lookonchain put the three-day total sent to Coinbase Prime at 17,733 BTC, about $1.48 billion. Federal agencies have used Coinbase Prime as a custodian before, and a transfer is not a sale. The government gave no explanation.

On 14 October 2026 Witt said the White House's first priority was securing and accounting for the bitcoin it already holds. He said there was no set plan for buying more, that open-market purchases would need approval from Congress, and that any acquisition had to be budget-neutral. Nineteen months after the order, the US has stopped selling, has not started buying and has still not published a full count of what it owns.