Former President Donald Trump outlined a plan to boost cryptocurrency growth and make the US a crypto mining superpower in his speech at the Nashville Bitcoin Conference 2024 on Saturday.
Trump announced that if elected, he would create a strategic bitcoin reserve in the US. “The policy of my administration will be to retain 100 percent of all bitcoin that the United States government currently owns or acquires in the future … as a core of the strategic national bitcoin reserve,” he said.
The U.S. government currently holds over 210,000 bitcoins, seized through illegal operations such as the online dark market Silk Road and the pyramid scheme BitConnect. It’s worth around $14 billion at the time of writing.
The move confirms rumors from bitcoin enthusiasts who hope that Trump's approval of a reserve asset could boost the cryptocurrency's price.
Trump also announced plans to establish a Bitcoin and Crypto Advisory Board, whose job would be to “design transparent regulations that benefit your industry” in the first 100 days of his next presidency. He said he wanted the US to become the “crypto capital of the world.”
Trump also promised to create a framework to ensure the safe expansion of stablecoins, “allowing us to expand the dominance of the USD to other places around the world,” and doubled down on his pledge to scrap any attempt to create a Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) or digital dollar, saying “there will never be a CBDC as long as I am President of the United States.”
“I will always defend the right to self-defense,” he told the cheering crowd. Perhaps the biggest cheer of all was his Day One pledge to fire Securities and Exchange Commission Chairman Gary Gensler.
“Once I'm sworn in, the prosecution will stop and the armament against your industry will end,” he said, naming Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts as the industry's sworn enemy.
He promised to make regulations more favorable to crypto mining operations in the U.S. so that workers don’t “have to move to China.” Trump again promised to release Ross Ulbricht, who was serving a life sentence for his involvement in the online underground marketplace Silk Road, where people could buy items like illegal drugs before the market was shut down in 2013.
The crowd was anticipating the announcement of the Bitcoin strategic reserve. On July 22, Senator Cynthia Lummis of Wyoming posted “Big things… in store this week” on X, two days before Fox Business reported that she would announce “legislation for a Bitcoin strategic reserve” at the conference.
Lummis appeared before the crowd just after Trump walked out to announce a “gift to President Donald Trump”: the bitcoin reserve law she authored.
“This is our Louisiana Purchase moment,” she said, explaining that the bill would “put the bitcoin that President Trump just mentioned into the reserve —[and] that's just the beginning.”
“In five years, the United States will accumulate 1 million bitcoins,” she added, “five percent of the world's bitcoins, and these will be held for a minimum of 20 years and can be used for one purpose: to reduce our debt.”
