Bitcoin prices experienced a 5% decline on Friday after U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
Bitcoin’s value fell by 4.63% to $87,925 as of Friday morning, with other digital tokens such as Ethereum, XRP, Cardano, and Solana also seeing drops of up to 5%.
The executive order introduces a “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve” and a “Digital Asset Stockpile” to centralize government-held cryptocurrencies. These reserves will primarily consist of digital assets seized through criminal and civil forfeiture cases, according to billionaire David Sacks.
He described the reserve as a “digital Fort Knox,” emphasizing Bitcoin’s role as a store of value comparable to “digital gold.”
“The Secretaries of Treasury and Commerce are authorized to develop budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional Bitcoin, provided that those strategies have no incremental costs on American taxpayers,” Sacks explained in a statement on social media platform X.
The US currently owns about $16.4 billion worth of Bitcoin and about $400 million worth of seven other tokens, largely attributable to asset forfeitures related to civil and criminal cases, Bloomberg reported.
Trump critics such as Democratic Senator Chris Murphy of Connecticut have characterized Trump’s cryptocurrency venture as a conduit to potential corruption on a massive scale.
