The White House is on the verge of a formal announcement on the U.S. Strategic Bitcoin Reserve — and the official leading the charge says the hard part is done.
Patrick Witt, Executive Director of the President’s Council of Advisors for Digital Assets, told an interviewer this week that the administration has cleared a major legal hurdle in standing up the reserve.
“We’ll have an announcement,” Witt said. “I wish I could say more… It’s a breakthrough as far as getting everything in place, legally sound, properly safeguarding the assets.”
The signal follows a similar declaration Witt made at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas, where he told the crowd an update was coming within weeks.
President Trump signed the executive order establishing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve on March 6, 2025. Since then, Witt says his deputy Harry John has driven the interagency process: identifying what legal authorities exist, commissioning the necessary legal memos, and building a custody and reporting infrastructure across federal agencies that were designed for gold, not private keys.
The reserve holds an estimated 328,372 BTC — roughly 1.6% of total global supply — accumulated through law enforcement seizures, including the Silk Road takedown, the 2022 Bitfinex hack recovery, and years of criminal forfeitures.
The executive order bars the Treasury from selling a single coin.
A government bitcoin hack lit a fire for the U.S. government
Witt pointed to a breach at the U.S. Marshals Service as proof that the reserve’s security mandate is urgent. A government contractor named John Daghita allegedly stole more than $46 million in cryptocurrency from USMS custody accounts in late 2025, and the FBI arrested him in March 2026. A separate $24 million theft was traced to October 2024.
“It’s a case in point for why it was so necessary that the president established the SBR,” Witt said.
An executive order dies the moment a new president takes office. That vulnerability is the core argument for two bills now moving through Congress. Rep. Nick Begich recently rebranded the BITCOIN Act as the American Reserves Modernization Act (ARMA), which would authorize the U.S. Treasury to purchase up to 200,000 BTC per year for five years — with holdings locked for a minimum of 20 years. Senator Cynthia Lummis has put Congress on a deadline, pushing for a vote before the summer recess as midterm campaigning begins to consume floor time.
If the BITCOIN Act passes, the Treasury’s first open-market Bitcoin purchase is projected for Q4 2026 — making the U.S. the first sovereign nation to actively accumulate Bitcoin as a strategic reserve asset.