White House Touts Crypto Report as U.S. Bitcoin Reserve Plans Remain Shrouded in Mystery
The White House just dropped another crypto report—complete with glossy charts and bureaucrat-approved buzzwords—while America's Bitcoin reserve strategy stays MIA. Someone check the printer for jammed adoption plans.
Digital Dollar Dilemma: Treasury officials keep name-dropping 'innovation' like a blockchain ICO, but concrete moves to secure BTC reserves? Crickets. Meanwhile, China's stacking SATs and El Salvador's drinking the orange Kool-Aid.
Regulatory Theater: The 47-page report touts 'guardrails' (read: slow-walked compliance hurdles) while DeFi protocols process more volume than some national banks. But hey, at least the PDF looks snappy.
Wake us when the mining rigs land at Fort Knox—until then, this is just another DC paper shuffle dressed up as progress. Bonus cynicism: Watch Wall Street lobbyists 'disrupt' their way into controlling the very thing they mocked in 2017.
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.
