Donald Trump’s scattershot rollout of his strategic crypto strategic reserve plan didn’t seem to make anyone happy this week — despite it being the big announcement ahead of Friday’s “first-ever crypto summit.”
During remarks ahead of the roundtable event Friday afternoon, Trump started by highlighting the, “Virtual Fort Knox for digital gold to be housed within the United States Treasury,” as he described his strategic reserve to a gathering of crypto leaders.
“That’s a big thing,” he added.
“President Trump is creating assets for the American people while most past presidents have created debt and a large part of this asset program can be in digital assets,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said during the summit, praising the reserve.
Trump received a round of applause in the room in response to his announcement about the strategic reserve, and a few thank yous from industry leaders for his pro-crypto stance before he kicked the media out. But on social media and elsewhere, backlash to the strategic reserve idea has been building all week. It started with Trump’s Truth Social announcement Sunday that he was directing a working group to establish a government-owned crypto fund.
“Maybe we should fixate on our demographic curve and interest that are primary girders of our debt instead of flights of fancy,” Republican Rep. David Schweikert told NOTUS Thursday afternoon.
“It’s wrong to steal my money for grift on the left; it’s also wrong to tax me for crypto bro schemes,” Trump ally and billionaire co-founder of Palantir, Joe Lonsdale wrote on X after the original crypto announcement Sunday.
By Thursday night, Trump seemed to take that specific criticism to heart and announced the new crypto reserve fund would only include crypto funds the U.S. government already has because they were seized during criminal or civil legal proceedings — and no new taxpayer funded purchases of crypto.
That announcement didn’t go over particularly well either: The price of bitcoin quickly dropped after the announcement, climbing only slightly on Friday.
“No active buying means this is just a fancy title for bitcoin holdings that already existed with the Govt. This is a pig in lipstick,” crypto hedge fund founder Charles Edwards wrote on X.
Associate director at Americans for Financial Reform and crypto skeptic, Mark Hays, told NOTUS there’s also a small number of people who hold massive amounts of bitcoin who stand to cash out handsomely — if the U.S. became a major buyer.
“Having the U.S. as a guaranteed buyer of a lot of bitcoin would give a signal to at least some of those whales, as they call them, who are ready to sell that when you sell, there’ll be a buyer,” Hays said. “That will allow them to cash out at a market high, so they can sell that stuff off and make a ton of real money.”
The new announcement doesn’t include any new U.S. buying of bitcoin or other currencies.
Trump’s original announcement said the reserve would include Ripple (XRP), Solana (SOL) and Cardano (ADA). He added shortly after that the larger bitcoin and Ethereum would be the “heart of the Reserve.”
Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase — which donated a million dollars toward Trump’s inauguration — said he was “still forming an opinion,” but thought “only bitcoin” would be the best option on X after Sunday’s announcement. (After Thursday’s, he called it “incredible execution from the Trump administration.”) The announcement Thursday means the primary reserve fund only holds bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies seized by the government will be held in a “digital asset stockpile,” according to Trump adviser and so-called crypto czar David Sacks.
Trump’s moves came after months of crypto lobbying and campaign funding.
Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse, one of the cryptocurrencies Trump originally promised to invest in Sunday, told the New York Times in December he was donating $5 million to Trump’s inauguration.
Crypto companies donated at least $6 million to Trump’s inauguration, NOTUS reported. Crypto affiliated PACs also poured more than $180 million into elections up and down the ballot last cycle, more than any other industry.
It’s not clear whether a strategic reserve — especially one just shifts around crypto the government already owns — was an industry priority.
Blockchain Association issued a letter laying out five priorities after November’s election results — establishing a crypto reserve was not among them. The organization did not immediately respond to NOTUS’ request for comment.
During the crypto summit Friday, Trump also promised an “end the federal bureaucracies’ war on crypto,” and criticized the Biden administration’s regulation of the industry.
Trump vowed on the campaign trail to oust crypto regulator and SEC chair, Gary Gensler. Trump picked his replacement, the crypto-friendly Paul Atkins in early December, but his Senate confirmation hearing still hasn’t been scheduled.
Correction: An earlier version of this story misidentified Mark Hays’ company. He is with Americans for Financial Reform.
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Claire Heddles is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.