Key Takeaways
Where is Texas’ BTC Reserve?
Texas has purchased $5 million worth of IBIT from BlackRock and has an additional $5 million for future purchases to build a strategic BTC reserve.
What about other states?
Only Arizona and New Hampshire introduced similar laws, but had yet to officially announce BTC purchases.
Texas has jumped on the current discounted Bitcoin and funded the US state’s first Strategic BTC Reserve (SBR).
In one statement on November 25, Lee Bratcher, chairman of the Texas Blockchain Council, announced that the state had purchased $5 million on November 20. Texas has allocated $10 million for the reserve, meaning half of the budget remains unused for future purchases.
Batcher added that the state secured $87,000 worth of BTC through BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) and plans to self-custody their assets in the future.
Source:
The $10 million BTC allocation was the “initial financing” according to the Texas Bitcoin [BTC] bill, and the budget cycle runs biennially (every two years).
Put another way, the remaining $5 million could be spent on another BTC purchase before the next state budget.
State and global race for BTC
Texas was one of three US states to pass a strategic BTC reserve law. It allowed the creation of a special fund, managed by the state comptroller, to invest in crypto assets with a market capitalization of at least $500 billion.
Arizona and New Hampshire too past related SBR legislation, but had not yet made a public purchase at the time of writing.
Source: Bitcoin Laws
Other US states that attempted such actions, such as Ohio, were shot down immediately after being introduced into the chambers.
A slow but steady structural bid
That said, nationally the US owns 326,000 BTC, worth $28 billion as of current market price.
Source: Bitcoin Treasuries
The US added about 127,000 BTC in the fourth quarter, seized in connection with money laundering investigations. China, however disputed this, claiming that it was the US that hacked LuBian’s mining pool.
At the global level, new players such as Abu Dhabi, the Czech Republic and El Salvador have joined the OGs.
In reality, according to For the UAE, BTC was considered a strategic reserve, similar to gold, and its holdings almost tripled from the third quarter.
That said, governments are now the third largest BTC holders in the world, after ETFs and publicly traded companies.
Meanwhile, increased interest in BTC from new national players could help mitigate the decline.
However, as in the case of Texas, the $10 million budget for two years is not comparable to the offer from financial institutions such as Strategy. Still, both lines of demand could increase BTC’s value in the long run.