White House digital-assets official Patrick Witt says an announcement on the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is imminent after a “breakthrough” in making the program legally sound and operationally secure — but don’t expect confirmation yet of any open-market Bitcoin buying.
In a May 17 interview with Scott Melker, Witt said work on the reserve has continued quietly while broader crypto-market legislation has dominated Washington. The program, he stressed, was never abandoned; it has been moving through a deliberate interagency process set in motion by a previous executive order.
“There’s still progress there. There’s still work going on behind the scenes,” Witt said. “We never stopped working on it.” He credited deputy Harry Jung with driving much of the internal coordination across agencies and White House policy teams. The work, Witt explained, has focused on the nuts and bolts of implementation: legal memos, agency authorities, asset safeguards, and whether existing powers are sufficient to underpin a reserve.
“We’ll have an announcement. And I wish I could say more at this time,” Witt added. “It’s a breakthrough as far as getting everything in place, legally sound, properly safeguarding the assets.”
What’s changing isn’t necessarily the question of whether the US will buy more Bitcoin; Witt’s comments emphasize building the reserve’s architecture — how government-held Bitcoin is identified, secured, transferred, accounted for and kept separate from the broader US Digital Asset Stockpile. That architecture matters because the federal government already holds crypto on its balance sheet and, Witt said, custody demands a higher standard after incidents such as the reported theft of “tier 2 assets” from US Marshals Service holdings.
“These assets have to be safeguarded. They are unique,” Witt said. “It’s going to require the government to do this in a bit of a different way and obviously take it very, very seriously because we have more of these assets on the balance sheet.”
Witt also framed the reserve as a policy priority that should be set in law, not left to an easily reversible executive order. He pointed to Senator Cynthia Lummis’ BITCOIN Act and Representative Nick Begich’s American Reserves Modernization Act (ARMA) as potential legislative vehicles. According to Witt, the House bill has absorbed stakeholder feedback and could see committee markup, possibly finding a path forward alongside must-pass legislation.
The reserve is being cast as part of a broader US strategy for digital-asset market structure — alongside the CLARITY Act, stablecoin rules and proposals on bank-permissible crypto activity. “There’s no more powerful institutional sponsorship than the US government saying we give this a thumbs up and we think that this should be part of the financial architecture,” Witt said, warning that failure to set the rules would leave the US “following somebody else’s rule book.”
Bottom line: expect a White House announcement focused on legal authorities, custody frameworks and interagency procedures for the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve. Whether that will include plans for additional Bitcoin accumulation remains unanswered. At press time, BTC traded at $76,825.
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