US government unlikely to buy Bitcoin for Strategic Reserve, says Bitget CEO

The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve sounds like something that should come with a giant “BUY” button. It doesn’t. And according to one of crypto’s most prominent exchange CEOs, it probably never will under this administration.

Bitget CEO Gracy Chen says the US government is unlikely to purchase Bitcoin for its Strategic Bitcoin Reserve before Trump leaves office, despite the president’s vocal pro-crypto posturing. The reason is less about political will and more about how the reserve was actually designed.

What the reserve actually does (and doesn’t do)

Trump signed the executive order establishing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve on March 6, 2025. The name suggests a Fort Knox for the digital age. The reality is considerably more modest.

The SBR holds an estimated 198,000 $BTC, valued at roughly $17.3 billion. That’s approximately 1% of Bitcoin’s total circulating supply. Not nothing, but not exactly a sovereign wealth fund either.

Here’s the critical detail most people gloss over: the reserve is limited exclusively to Bitcoin seized through civil and criminal forfeiture proceedings. The executive order explicitly prohibits new acquisitions using taxpayer funds. It also bars any sales of the holdings.

Think of it less as a strategic buying program and more as a government-mandated diamond hands policy for coins it already confiscated. The government is essentially saying it will hold what it has and never sell, but it won’t be showing up on exchanges to accumulate more.

The framework emphasizes “budget neutrality,” which is Washington’s way of saying Congress doesn’t need to appropriate a single dollar for this initiative. That constraint alone makes active market purchases functionally impossible without new legislation.

Why the gap between rhetoric and reality matters

Trump’s administration has positioned itself as the most crypto-friendly in US history. It has moved to prohibit central bank digital currency initiatives and generally signaled openness to digital assets. The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve announcement itself was designed to generate headlines, and it succeeded.

But Chen’s assessment cuts through the marketing. The legal architecture of the SBR simply doesn’t support the kind of sovereign accumulation that many Bitcoin bulls priced in when the reserve was first announced. Investors who expected the US Treasury to start dollar-cost averaging into Bitcoin were, to put it gently, getting ahead of the paperwork.

This matters because market narratives around sovereign Bitcoin buying have been a meaningful driver of price expectations. When a country with the world’s reserve currency announces a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve,” the imagination fills in the gaps. Traders envisioned a scenario where the US government becomes one of the largest active Bitcoin buyers on the planet. Chen is effectively telling them to recalibrate.

The contrast with other sovereign approaches is instructive. El Salvador has been actively accumulating Bitcoin as a reserve asset, buying regularly regardless of price. Bhutan has pursued its own distinct strategy of mining and holding $BTC. These countries, while far smaller economically, have demonstrated what active sovereign Bitcoin accumulation actually looks like. The US version is a different animal entirely.

The supply side of the equation

If the bullish case for the SBR doesn’t rest on new buying, where does it rest? On the supply side.

Locking away 198,000 $BTC permanently removes a meaningful chunk of potential sell pressure from the market. Before the executive order, there was always the looming possibility that the US government would liquidate its seized Bitcoin holdings at auction, as it has done multiple times in the past. Those auctions, while orderly, added supply to the market at prices that sometimes undercut prevailing rates.

That overhang is now gone. The SBR functions as a structural feature of Bitcoin’s supply landscape rather than a demand catalyst. For a market where scarcity narratives drive significant price action, permanently removing 1% of circulating supply from potential sale is not trivial.

Bitcoin currently trades around $91,151, with a total market capitalization of approximately $1.81 trillion. That represents roughly 60% of the total crypto market cap of around $3 trillion. The government’s $17.3 billion in holdings, while substantial in absolute terms, represents a small fraction of that total market value.

The practical implication for traders is straightforward: price expectations should be anchored to the reduced likelihood of government sell-offs rather than hopes of government buying. The floor just got a little more solid, but the ceiling didn’t move.

What investors should actually watch

Chen’s comments suggest a broader recalibration is needed in how the market thinks about sovereign Bitcoin involvement. The speculative narrative of governments racing to accumulate $BTC made for great content, but the legal, political, and budgetary realities in the world’s largest economy don’t support it.

That doesn’t make the SBR meaningless. A permanent no-sell commitment from the entity holding 198,000 $BTC is genuinely significant for supply dynamics. But it shifts the conversation from “when will governments start buying” to “what other factors will drive the next leg up.”

Institutional adoption continues to accelerate through spot Bitcoin ETFs and corporate treasury allocations. Macroeconomic conditions, particularly interest rate trajectories and dollar strength, remain the primary external forces acting on Bitcoin’s price. These are the variables that matter more than whether a government might hypothetically start buying.

For anyone still holding out hope that Congress could authorize actual Bitcoin purchases, the political math is daunting. Convincing legislators to appropriate taxpayer dollars for a volatile digital asset would require the kind of bipartisan consensus that Washington hasn’t produced on much of anything lately. Chen appears to view that scenario as effectively zero-probability during the current term.

The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve is real. Its impact on markets is real. But the version of it that exists on paper and the version that lived in crypto Twitter’s collective imagination are two very different things.