President Donald Trump's White House says the administration is still trying to "evaluate the best structure" for building a bitcoin reserve at the federal level.
The process has reportedly been complicated by the uncertainty over where to house it — potentially in either Treasury or Commerce departments, according to a Bloomberg report.
Congress still hasn't gotten any closer to producing the legislation that White House advisers have said would be needed to back up the final effort.
The White House acknowledges that the process for setting up a long-term stockpile of bitcoin BTC$63,439.38 is still being worked out 16 months after President Donald Trump ordered his administration to build the reserve, and a report from Bloomberg suggests that the Departments of the Treasury and Commerce are both being considered as homes.
Trump had issued an executive order in March of 2025 to get the work started on what he called a strategic reserve for bitcoin and a separate stockpile of several other cryptocurrencies. The federal agencies have since examined what crypto holdings the U.S. has (and has declined to share that number), and they've been devising a plan for building the funds, which Bloomberg reported on Monday has been made more complicated by the two departments both making a case to run them.
“President Trump campaigned on a vision of cementing America as the global capital of cryptocurrency and other cutting-edge technologies," said White House spokeswoman Liz Huston in a statement sent to CoinDesk. "To deliver on the president’s vision, the Trump administration continues to evaluate the best structure for a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile.”
The White House's chief crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, and his predecessor in that role had both said that they'll need Congress to fully back up the formation and activation of the crypto funds. Presidential orders don't carry the weight of law, and no legislation has yet advanced, though such efforts have simmered among lawmakers in both the Senate and House of Representatives, And if Republicans lose the majority in the House or both chambers in this year's midterm elections, it's unlikely such a bill will formalize Trump's concept anytime soon.
Even if the administration works out the structure for the funds, it's unclear whether they'll be able to pull the lever to officially put its bitcoin holding — estimated at more than 300,000, or about $21 billion — into that virtual vault.
The government's bitcoin holdings would be a long-term investment. Trump and his administration has called it a strategic reserve, though it doesn't fit the usual definition of that phrase, because it's meant to be held for a long period and not doled out during market emergencies.
When Trump issued the order, he asked his administration to come up with ways to acquire more bitcoin without using taxpayer money. Several ideas have since been floated, though if they'd started buying the asset when Trump called for it, they'd have bought at $93,000, and BTC has dropped by about a third since then to today's price just above $64,000.
The crypto sector had widely considered the bitcoin reserve a done deal when Trump declared it, so digital asset enthusiasts and lobbyists have been frustrated in the wait for action that's not guaranteed to develop. In the meantime, the president has amassed his own, personal bitcoin holdings of more than $50 million, according to his recent financial disclosure.
