At a Senate Banking Committee hearing yesterday, executive director of the President’s Council of Advisers on Digital Assets Bo Hines sat flanked by Chairman Tim Scott and Digital Assets Subcommittee Chair Cynthia Lummis and confirmed that the United States has already begun moving seized or previously held Bitcoin into the newly created Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.

Trump’s Bitcoin Reserve Play Advances

The disclosure came in response to a question about the execution of President Donald Trump’s March 6 executive order on digital assets. Hines explained that “the EO… mandated an accounting to take place in which the Treasury [is] spearheading that,” noting that the department has now “received the numbers from the different agencies inside of the government.” Those numbers reflect coins accumulated piecemeal over the past decade through criminal forfeitures, civil penalties, and unspent research allocations across multiple departments.

Describing the next phase, Hines told lawmakers that “there are a lot of different actors that held on to some Bitcoin and in some fashion or another,” adding that “now the process begins in […] establishing the reserve, the actual infrastructure behind it, and getting all of that accomplished.”

Hines stressed that publication of the full audit is optional: “There’s nothing in the EO that mandates that that report become public, but we could choose to make it public at some point.”

The administration’s strategic intent is unambiguous. “We’ve stated publicly that Bitcoin is digital gold,” Hines said, repeating language he has used since early March. “We believe it’s in the best interest of the United States to garner as much as we can possibly get.” That ambition, he added, must be squared with the order’s fiscal guard-rails: “Obviously this has to be done in budget-neutral ways that don’t cost the taxpayer a dime. The president was clear about that in the executive order.”

Hines, gesturing to the t

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Author: Jake Simmons