Crypto-friendly US Senator Cynthia Lummis has confirmed that acquiring funds for the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve (SBR) can “start anytime” now, though legislative red tape is holding it back.
In an X post on Monday, Lummis said that while it remains a “slog” on the legislative side of things, thanks to “President Trump, the acquisition of funds for an SBR can start anytime.”
Lummis made the comments in response to a post from ProCap BTC chief investment officer Jeff Park, who shared a video of himself and Bitcoin bull Anthony Pompliano discussing the potential of the SBR.
Park was hypothesizing what would happen if the government were able to utilize its $1 trillion worth of paper gains from gold to reinvest into Bitcoin (BTC).
He argued that, given the government’s approximately $37.88 trillion in fiscal debt, utilizing the $1 trillion in paper gains would be a relatively minor risk in the grand scheme of things.
“And so if there’s a way to unlock the ability to build leverage on the paper gains of gold to take a call option on Bitcoin. There’s something incredible here that could happen… If you own Bitcoin, and you assume that it’s going to go up by 12% a year, you’ll make a 30x in 30 years,” he said.
“It’s actually going to be able to cover most of the fiscal deficit hole that exists.”
In response, Lummis stated that this was “a fabulous articulation of why the SBR and passing the BITCOIN Act makes so much sense.”
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It is not yet clear exactly how capital will be raised for the SBR. According to the official government fact sheet, the reserve will initially be “capitalized with Bitcoin owned by the Department of Treasury” that was seized through civil or criminal proceedings.
Then it states that additional BTC may be acquired via budget-neutral avenues that “impose no incremental costs on American taxpayers.”
Government Bitcoin buys around the corner?
It has been seven months since President Donald J. Trump signed an Executive Order to establish the SBR. However, the concrete formulation of the reserve is yet to be confirmed, resulting in a fair amount of speculation and debate around the exact launch timeline.
Some, however, anticipate that the government may announce some BTC purchases in the near future. Speaking with CNBC over the weekend, Anthony Pompliano said there are three key things the market is keeping an eye on right now:
“The first is that the US government at some point is gonna announce that they are buying Bitcoin. Creating the initial kinda strategic reserve and sitting the Bitcoin we already had there was good. But that’s kinda not the main dish.”
“The main dish is when they start buying, and I think that will happen at some point.”
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