White House crypto advisor Patrick Witt said the Trump administration will announce new details about the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve within “the coming weeks,” with the update seen as both a policy milestone and a response to custody following an alleged exploit involving digital assets held by the US Marshals Service.
Witt spoke at Consensus 2026 in Miami on Wednesday said the government’s work on the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, or SBR, and its separate stock of digital assets had largely remained out of public view. The next announcement, he indicated, will focus on “exactly the progress that has been made and where we go from here.”
Trump’s Bitcoin Reserve Heads Towards New Update
President Donald Trump signed an executive order in March 2025 establishing the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a U.S. Digital Asset Stockpile, ultimately forfeiting the BTC-capitalized bitcoin reserve to the Treasury through criminal or civil asset forfeiture. The non-bitcoin inventory includes other forfeited digital assets under a separate framework.
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Witt directly linked the upcoming update to a recent security incident. “So, as many people in this room may have seen, there was an exploitation of certain assets that were in the hands of the U.S. Marshals just a month or two ago. We obviously started work on the SBR, the digital asset stockpile, without thinking about it, but we obviously thought about the need to properly secure these assets. So it’s a great example of why it was so necessary for the president to establish the SBR and for him to direct the agencies to take these assets very seriously and protect them properly.”
He added that the custody of digital assets presents challenges that do not fit neatly into existing government asset management procedures. “Custody is unique to digital assets. So we’ve made a tremendous amount of progress, which has kind of been in the background, and we’ll be making an announcement in the coming weeks, you know, outlining exactly what progress has been made and where we go from here.”
The exploit Witt is referring to appears to be the alleged theft linked to John Daghita, also known online as ‘John’ or ‘Lick’. The case became public after blockchain researcher ZachXBT linked the “John/Lick” persona to wallets that moved funds connected to U.S. government-controlled crypto addresses. TRM Labs later said Daghita was arrested in Sint Maarten during a joint operation involving the French Gendarmerie and the FBI, with authorities alleging he stole cryptocurrency from wallets linked to the US Marshals Service.
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According to TRM’s summary, the investigation traced some of the activity to cryptocurrency seized in connection with the 2016 Bitfinex hack. TRM said approximately $24.9 million of the traced funds came from a US government-controlled wallet, while ZachXBT alleged that Daghita stole more than $46 million in seized crypto assets by abusing access at his father’s company CMDSS, which a US Marshals had a service contract.
Witt had previewed the update days earlier at Bitcoin 2026 in Las Vegas. In a panel discussion at The Venetian Resort, he said the government has been working for months on the legal interpretations needed to protect bitcoin on the government’s balance sheet following Trump’s executive order. “In the next few weeks we will be making a big announcement,” Witt said there, adding that the administration believed it could make a “major step forward on the part of the executive branch” even before Congress acted.
He also made it clear at Bitcoin 2026 that legislation would still be needed to make the policy more permanent. That distinction is key: an executive framework can shape guardianship and management now, but a legal framework would be more difficult for a future administration to dismantle.
At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $81,530.
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