A new Federal Reserve research note has given the most detailed official assessment to date of proposals to finance a US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) by re-marking the Treasury’s gold hoard to market—and the verdict is cautious. In “Official Reserve Revaluations: The International Experience,” senior economist Colin Weiss reviews five historical cases in which governments tapped unrealised gains on gold and foreign-exchange reserves and weighs what such a manoeuvre might mean for the United States.
Crucially for the market, the note acknowledges the Bitcoin dimension in a footnote that has drawn wide attention on Capitol Hill: “In the US, the idea has come up in the context of helping to establish a strategic bitcoin reserve or a sovereign wealth fund, and the use of revaluation proceeds was proposed in recent legislation by Senator Lummis.” Although bracketed as an aside, the reference amounts to the first time a Federal Reserve publication has explicitly analysed the mechanics underpinning a Bitcoin reserve bill.
Lummis’s 118th-Congress proposal—formally the Boosting Innovation, Technology and Competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide (BITCOIN) Act—would “establish a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve … to ensure the transparent management of Bitcoin holdings of the Federal Government,” according to the bill text.
Under Section 5, the Treasury would be authorised to purchase up to 200,000 Bitcoin a year—capped at one million coins, about five percent of eventual supply—while a 20-year minimum holding period would shield the cache from political meddling. Section 6 mandates quarterly cryptographic “proof-of-reserve” attestations, and Section 7 would consolidate forfeited Bitcoins held by agencies such as the US Marshals Service into the new vault network. Funding relies heavily on the gold revaluation gambit: Section 9 instructs the Federal Reserve Banks to tender their gold certificates for re-issuance at fair-value prices and diverts up to $6 billion a year of Fed remittances through 2029 to offset the purchase program.
At press time, BTC traded at $114,776.
