Admiral Samuel Paparo appeared before the Senate Armed Services Committee on April 21 for a review of the U.S. Indo-Pacific Command’s posture ahead of the fiscal year 2027 defense request.
Paparo reportedly revealed that INDOPACOM operates a Bitcoin node and views the protocol’s architecture as operationally relevant for securing networks and projecting power.
In February 2024, Paparo told Senator Elizabeth Warren that the “opacity” of cryptocurrency was a major factor in the rise of proliferation, terrorism and illegal trading. He added that crypto “makes the world less secure,” and acknowledged that blockchain methodologies held promise for guaranteeing financial transactions.
Washington’s dominant view was that crypto was a compliance headache, a sanctions evasion tool and a revenue stream for North Korea.
Now Paparo addresses Bitcoin’s cryptography, blockchain accountability, and proof-of-work as components of a network security and power projection toolkit. In two years the vocabulary changed from pathology to protocol. This could possibly be related to SoftWar author and US Space Force service member Jason Lowery’s work in this area.
How Washington built the policy foundation
Paparo’s comment from 2026 entered a policy architecture that had been building for more than a year.
On January 23, 2025, the White House made it US policy to protect legal access to open public blockchain networks and promote dollar-backed stablecoins worldwide. That order drew a line in Washington, recognizing open public blockchains as infrastructure and separating them from the broader “anything crypto is suspect” category.
On March 6, 2025, the White House established a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, which stipulated that Bitcoin placed in the reserve would not be sold, giving it the Treasury treatment that the U.S. government applies to gold.
On July 18, 2025, the GENIUS Act was passed, and the White House framed it as a national security tool, tying stablecoin regulation to the dollar’s status as a reserve currency and expanding its scope.
In April 2026, the Treasury Department had proposed rules to implement the GENIUS Act’s AML requirements and launched an initiative to share cybersecurity information for digital asset companies, describing these companies as a critical part of the U.S. financial sector whose resilience was relevant to the broader system.
That placed digital asset infrastructure within critical systems thinking, the same framework that Paparo’s position statement uses for INDOPACOM’s own mission networks.
Why location changes everything
INDOPACOM’s April 2026 posture statement describes a command built around denying China’s objectives, achieving “information and decision superiority” and deploying a “data-centric Zero Trust Architecture Mission Partner Environment” within its partner network, with resilient C5ISRT systems capable of operating across contested domains.
In a hearing room dedicated to China deterrence, cyber effects and zero-trust mission networks, a comment about the Bitcoin protocol ends up in the command’s strategic vocabulary, placed there by the commander himself.
Reuters reported in January 2026 that the Chinese-led mBridge platform had processed more than US$55.5 billion in more than 4,000 cross-border transactions, with the digital yuan accounting for about 95% of the volume.
The Indo-Pacific theater is already a battle over the payments and settlement architecture, and Paparo’s command is the US institution most directly responsible for managing that battle.
Bitcoin’s reclassification goes hand in hand with Washington’s active enforcement stance.
According to the Treasury Department’s March 2026 congressional report, North Korean cybercriminals stole at least $2.8 billion in digital assets between January 2024 and September 2025, including the $1.5 billion Bybit theft that the FBI attributed to Pyongyang.
The Treasury Department’s 2026 National Money Laundering Risk Assessment describes that illicit actors prefer stablecoins for money laundering due to their liquidity and stability.
Washington’s current stance is a dichotomy between open public blockchains getting protection at the infrastructure level, Bitcoin getting treatment as a reserve asset, stablecoins getting statesmanship, and the rest of the digital asset ecosystem still going through a hard compliance lens.
Washington parses the stack by protocol type, with each layer getting its own policy treatment, and the Treasury Department’s April 2026 cyber initiative fits right into that model.
How this is resolved
The bull case runs through confirmation and extension. If other defense or intelligence agencies adopt similar language at the protocol level, NDAA or National Strategy documents could eventually address public blockchain participation as part of resiliency planning or as an adversary attribution tool.
The trajectory from the January 2025 Executive Order through the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and to an INDOPACOM hearing supports that arc, with Bitcoin completing its transition from asset class to strategic substrate.
The bear case is accompanied by scandals and backlash. A major theft linked to the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a wave of ransomware timed to a geopolitical flashpoint, or a high-profile sanctions evasion case could overwhelm the infrastructure argument and prompt officials to treat Bitcoin as inextricably linked to the broader problem of illicit finance.
Paparo’s own 2024 language shows how quickly that framing can dominate a hearing room, and the Treasury Department’s compliance lens remained fully in place throughout the policy evolution.
If Paparo’s comment is correct, the surrounding policy file is already rewriting in which rooms Bitcoin is discussed.
A reserve resource enters conversations about budgets, fiduciary matters and sovereign wealth. A protocol woven into zero-trust mission networks fuels conversations about resilience, attribution, and adversaries.
A protocol relevant to zero-trust mission networks falls into a different policy category than a ransomware payment method.
Once these separations become part of the official vocabulary, the audience for Bitcoin in Washington expands well beyond financial regulators and compliance officials.