The long-awaited White House crypto strategy is out, but the 163-page report isn't likely to tell the crypto industry much that it doesn't already know — including about the federal bitcoin reserves, which remain a black box for a sector keen to learn anything new.
The report offers the most comprehensive outline of President Donald Trump's crypto push to date, covering all the major and minor policy efforts underway this year. For an industry that's been following each of those closely, however, it doesn't offer revelations of new initiatives or go into a deep explanation of individual policy pursuits.
Senior administration officials said on Wednesday that it's meant as a guidepost against which the government's progress can be measured. So far, the progress has been considerable when compared with the administration of former President Joe Biden. A new law, the GENIUS Act, already demands regulations to govern U.S. stablecoin issuers, and an even bigger piece of legislation to set up rules for the wider crypto markets, known in the House as the Clarity Act, has cleared the House of Representatives and is underway in the Senate.
But in the report, Trump's earlier call for crypto stockpiles — one for bitcoin (BTC) and another for all other digital assets — only made the last page of the report, where the initiative was broadly summarized without the detail that wasn't offered before.
One of the officials said the infrastructure is well underway for that project and that there will be more information soon.
Bo Hines, one of Trump's top crypto advisers, had suggested earlier this month that the president's executive order calling for the reserves had required a report on the process but that the administration wasn't yet making it public and may choose not to. The lack of specifics had many crypto observers hoping the plans might be further revealed in this week's more comprehensive document.
The industry's stakes remain high on that project, which had initially disappointed many observers by promising a fund built only on assets organically seized by government agencies, but that also hinted at the administration's desire to find other ways to fund it. Lawmakers in Congress may also play a part by working on legislation that reinforces the process. Senator Cynthia Lummis has been in the vanguard of that with her Boosting Innovation, Technology, and Competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide (BITCOIN) Act, but it hasn't yet moved.
A call to action
Meanwhile, Wednesday's report could be read by sitting U.S. regulators as a call to action. The group of regulators who agreed on its content “encourages the Federal government to operationalize President Trump’s promise to make America the 'crypto capital of the world' and adopt a pro-innovation mindset toward digital assets and blockchain technologies,” the report said.
More specifically, its core recommendations suggest that the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) “should use their existing authorities to immediately enable the trading of digital assets at the federal level.” That's a push to get started with regulation even as Congress produces its market structure work, and though the CFTC still lacks a permanent leadership under Trump, SEC Chairman Paul Atkins has suggested his agency has the authorities to act that he's been exploring.
The report also included a tax section that echoes a number of the ideas also pushed by Senator Lummis, the chair of the Senate Banking Committee's subcommittee on digital assets. A package of tax revisions she included in her legislative effort are meant to reduce burdens on crypto users, including by setting a minimum value by which a transaction should be subject to capital-gains considerations and an overhaul of when gains should be factored into crypto rewards from practices such as staking.
Read More: Why Doesn't the U.S. Have a Bitcoin Reserve, Yet?
