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But the Executive Order pulled back those plans quite a bit. It announced that the U.S. would not buy any new Bitcoin, but simply hold onto the cryptocurrencies that they had seized in seizures. Andrew O’Neill, the digital assets managing director of S&P Global Ratings, called the order “mainly symbolic” in a statement to TIME.
Industry insiders cheered the decision to mainly focus on a separate Bitcoin reserve, effectively demoting the importance of the other crypto projects—whose founders have been lobbying Trump for support. “It would have been a pretty clearly a cronyist outcome where well-connected people were able to get the government to buy their tokens without really any obvious strategic rationale for doing so,” Roy says. “Bitcoin is a special case; it has no CEO.”
The Executive Order also calls for a full audit of the U.S.’ crypto holdings, which is estimated to include around 200,000 Bitcoin (worth about $17 billion). Yesha Yadav, a law professor at Vanderbilt who specializes in crypto and securities regulation, says that the audit will be important to determine how much of that Bitcoin is usable, and how much might need to be returned to fraud victims. A good portion of that Bitcoin stash likely comes from the Bitfinex hack, which the U.S. government seized in 2022. “Whether or not they’re motivated to trace every single victim in that case, whether victims have come forward, and whose claims have not been dealt with—that is something that's going to have to be looked at,” Yadav says.
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