President Trump signed an executive order on Thursday to create a national stock of Bitcoin and other digital currencies, said a consultant, a daring idea that was generally criticized as an arrangement to enrich crypto investors.
The basis of the stock will be a stock of Bitcoin, estimated at no less than $ 17 billion, which the United States has seized over the years in legal cases, according to a summary of the order on social media by David Sacks, the Crypto and AI policy of the White House, the crypto and AI policy shed.
The order also calls on to develop federal agencies to develop “budget -neutral strategies” to buy more Bitcoin, the most popular digital currency, as long as those purchases do not generate extra costs for taxpayers.
“This executive order emphasizes President Trump's dedication to make the US the” Crypto capital of the world “,” Mr Sacks wrote in his position. He said that the United States would not sell Bitcoin in the reserve, which he compared with 'a digital fort Knox'.
Since Mr Trump took office in January, his administration has quickly moved to elevate the crypto industry, a volatile sector that had fought with federal supervisors for years. The Securities and Exchange Commission has dropped lawsuits against two of the largest American crypto companies and stopped research into various others. And on Friday Mr. Trump is planned to host crypto managers in the White House for a first 'crypto summit'.
Mr. Trump has a personal interest in the success of the Crypto industry, creating conflicts of interest that have increased alarms in the field of government ethics. Last year he started a company, World Liberty Financial, which offers a cryptocurrency called WLFI. Only a few days before his inauguration, he also started selling a so-called memecoin-a type of cryptocurrency bound to an online joke or a celebrity figure.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The idea of an American crypto reserve received a grip last year when Mr. Trump embraced the industry on the campaign track. Proponents argued that an investment in Bitcoin would help the government split away from the $ 36 trillion national debt, and to ensure that the United States remained dominant in a hypothetical future where the global economy runs on cryptocurrencies.
But skeptics said the plan seemed calculated to enrich crypto managers who already had large amounts of Bitcoin by lifting the price of the token. They argued that it was dangerous to link the economic future of the nation to a very volatile active.
During a conference in Nashville in July, Mr Trump gave a speech for a crowd of Bitcoin enthusiasts and promised to set up a national stock. He doubled that promise last weekend and posted on social media that he was planning to create a reserve consisting of Bitcoin and other less well -known cryptocurrencies, such as Solana, Cardano, Ether and XRP.
That plan attracted criticism from some Crypto leaders, who claimed that the only one should be active in a national reserve Bitcoin, the most valuable cryptocurrency on the market.
In the summary of the executive order, Mr Sacks wrote that the government would create a separate stock of digital assets than Bitcoin. But he said that the stock would only include coins that were obtained in criminal or bourgeois attacks, and that the government would not move to buy cryptocurrencies except Bitcoin.
Crypto investors celebrated the announcement on social media and called it a “historical day” and a “massive victory” for the country.
“By keeping Bitcoin and other digital assets for the long term, the White House uses future progress,” said Nathan McCauley, the Chief Executive of the crypto company Anchorage Digital, in a statement. “Expect this step to catalyze the acceptance of crypto with more governments and institutions.”
