In brief
- U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said Thursday that the U.S. government will not be buying additional Bitcoin to supplement reserves of the token acquired via law enforcement seizures.
- For months, White House officials had stoked the hopes of Bitcoiners by saying they wanted to acquire as much of the cryptocurrency “as possible.”
- But the same officials said they would ultimately defer to the Treasury Secretary on whether such purchases could and should be made in a “budget-neutral” way.
U.S. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent spoiled the dreams of Bitcoiners worldwide Thursday, stating outright that the federal government will not be purchasing additional Bitcoin to supplement its existing supply of the cryptocurrency.
“We’re not going to be buying that,” Bessent said during a Thursday morning appearance on Fox Business.
The Treasury Secretary did endorse the notion of a U.S. strategic Bitcoin reserve, which President Donald Trump established via a March executive order. But Bessent said such a reserve, which currently consists of Bitcoin seized by U.S. law enforcement,will only be grown in the future by similar seizures.
“We are going to use confiscated assets and continue to build that up,” Bessent said of the Bitcoin reserve. “We’re going to stop selling that.”
The Treasury Secretary added he estimates the U.S. government’s current Bitcoin holdings to equal between $15 billion to $20 billion in value at current prices.
Bessent’s comments mark a departure from previous statements by White House officials on the subject.
For months, Trump officials have floated the possibility of the federal government purchasing additional Bitcoin. The prospect has thrilled many Bitcoin holders, both due to the legitimacy such acquisitions could grant the cryptocurrency, and the potential deflationary impact massive state-level purchases of the token could have on its price.
In March, shortly after Trump established a federal strategic Bitcoin reserve, White House AI and crypto czar David Sacks told Decrypt that Bessent and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick would have the final say on determining whether to purchase additional Bitcoin via “budget-neutral” methods, such as selling off other government reserve assets including gold.
For months, White House officials have since repeated the line that they want to “acquire as much Bitcoin as possible.”
But plans for such acquisitions never materialized in the months since the Bitcoin reserve’s announcement. Late last month, the White House released a sprawling, 168-page report on crypto policy recommendations. Though it was supposed to include further information about the Trump administration’s crypto reserve plans, it notably omitted any details on the subject.
One of the most consistently vocal White House officials on the subject of purchasing Bitcoin was Bo Hines, executive director of the President’s Working Group on Digital Assets.
Since March Hines has repeatedly said, in private and in public, that the Trump administration wanted to acquire as much Bitcoin as it possibly could.“I’ve said that at every conference I’ve spoken at in the last two to three months,” Hines said during testimony before the U.S. Senate Banking Committee in June.
Earlier this week, Hines announced he had left his White House role, effective immediately.
UPDATE (August 14, 2025, 11:03 a.m. ET): Adds paragraphs about Hines.
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