Former U.S. President Donald Trump promised to build a “strategic Bitcoin stockpile” for the United States at the Bitcoin 2024 conference in Nashville on Saturday. The Republican presidential candidate's keynote address followed a week of growing rumors and reports on the matter with a relatively vague announcement to the packed room of Bitcoiners.
"As the final part of my plan today, I am announcing that if I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration, the United States of America, to keep 100% of all the Bitcoin the U.S. government currently holds or acquires into the future,” Trump said. “I hope you do well.”
Immediately after, Senator Cynthia Lummis announced specific details of her own "strategic Bitcoin reserve" proposal, with a press release noting that the U.S. would "establish a decentralized network of secure Bitcoin vaults operated by the United States Department of Treasury" and seek to acquire 1 million total Bitcoin to hold.
It's not immediately clear if Trump and Lummis are coordinating on the plan or if they're separate Republican-led initiatives with similar aims.
The pledge to establish a national Bitcoin reserve—and keep all of the BTC currently held by the U.S. government through seizures—rounded out a roughly 45-minute-long keynote address in which Trump promised to end the Democrats’ regulatory onslaught against cryptocurrency companies and holders. If elected, Trump would refashion the U.S. into a “Bitcoin superpower,” he said.
“I'm laying out my plan to ensure that the United States will be the crypto capital of the planet,” Trump told the packed conference room, which promptly erupted in applause.
He warned that the regulatory roadblocks that have plagued crypto companies under the Biden administration would continue stymieing innovation stateside under the would-be administration of his likely Democratic challenger Kamala Harris.
“If [the Democrats] win this election, every one of you will be gone,” Trump told attendees. “They will be vicious. They will be ruthless.”
The meandering manifesto—which was peppered with the former president's familiar rhetoric on immigration, the validity of the 2020 U.S. presidential election results and the dangers of the “woke" mob—did not dig deep into crypto fundamentals.
During the speech, the 78-year-old politician rattled off popular crypto slang, promising to send Bitcoin “to the moon.” He also glossed over familiar industry talking points such as the importance of self-custodying one’s crypto to promote personal “freedom” and “privacy”—two values which BTC’s proponents regard as central to the ethos of the broader bitcoin movement.
Trump hardly talked about crypto at all when he first took the stage at 3pm CDT, roughly an hour behind schedule.
In his opening remarks, Trump touched upon a dizzying stream of seemingly unrelated, non-crypto topics: A recent attack on Israel; the political leanings of country musician Billy Ray Cyrus' daughter; and the death of firefighter Corey Comperatore, who was killed by a stray bullet during the attempted assassination of Trump at a rally in Butler, Pennsylvania two weeks ago.
In the first few minutes of his speech, Trump also rattled off the names of roughly a dozen celebrities and politicians who turned out to support him at the conference, including internet personality Jake Paul and musician Kid Rock.
He gave a special nod to BTC Inc. CEO David Bailey, the main organizer behind the conference.
"David… whatever the hell you do, you did a hell of a job,” Trump said.
Trump’s BTC reserve plan echoed a policy proposal that Robert F. Kennedy Jr. endorsed on Friday in a speech that took aim at Trump’s shifting stance on cryptocurrencies. Trump called Bitcoin a “scam” in an interview with Fox News as recently as 2021, adding that he didn’t like the asset because “it's another currency competing against the dollar."
But Trump, in his latest speech, left little room for doubt about his position on Bitcoin and the broader cryptocurrency industry in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election.
“Those who say that Bitcoin is a threat to the dollar have the story exactly backwards,” Trump told the crowd on Saturday.
Editor's note: This story was updated after publication with additional details.
Edited by Andrew Hayward