Cathie Wood, the founder and CEO of ARK Invest, said she expects the Trump administration could go beyond just holding on to seized bitcoin and start buying BTC to build a U.S. strategic reserve. A shift she believes could become a catalytic signal for markets and other governments.
Speaking on ARK’s “Bitcoin Brainstorm” podcast in a episode Dated Jan. 8, Wood framed government purchases as a potential turning point at a time when she believes institutional participation is “just beginning” and Bitcoin’s supply dynamics are becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.
“We’ve seen very little institutional buy-in, it’s just getting started,” Wood said. “And I think if we let the US, for example, not just add confiscated bitcoin to a strategic reserve, but start buying outside of it, and we don’t know if that will be the case. But if they were to do that, I feel like that would trigger what we’re all waiting for, which is the scarcity value reasserting itself now that we’re almost 20 million bitcoin outstanding and we only have one million left to go.”
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In the discussion, Wood suggested that the government’s stance thus far has effectively been limited to confiscated assets. She contrasted that with what she described as an earlier ambition for scale, noting that “the original intention was to own a million bitcoin,” before adding her view that a pivot to purchasing is plausible.
Midterms Could Boost US Bitcoin Reserve Buying
Wood linked that possibility to political incentives ahead of the 2026 US midterm elections, describing Trump as motivated to maintain momentum and avoid being politically sidelined. “President Trump doesn’t want to be a lame duck,” she said. “So I have a feeling he’s going to work with his crypto and AI czar to do a few things… [and] it seems like there is reluctance about actually buying bitcoin for the strategic reserve. So far it’s been seized… So I actually think they’re going to buy.”
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Wood also pointed to what she sees as aligned constituencies around the president, arguing that he has “all kinds of reasons” to get into crypto, while emphasizing that the political calculus matters because of the medium-term timeline.
As the conversation turned to how such purchases might be accomplished, Wood reiterated the idea that any reserve strategy should be budget neutral. She did not outline a mechanism, but addressed the constraint as an important factor for feasibility.
Wood argued that explicit U.S. purchases would not just be a domestic market event. It could force other capitals to reconsider their reserve policies. “Something that is very important… we thought countries would adopt it much sooner than they did,” she said. “I think if the US actually says, ‘Okay, now we’re going to buy,’ that will make a lot of other governments think about this. Do they want to be held hostage by the dollar…? And you know, no, they don’t. So put some bitcoin in your reserves.”
If that momentum accelerates, Wood warned that emerging market currencies could face renewed pressure. He described a scenario in which reserve diversification into Bitcoin reshapes volatility in weaker fiat regimes, a downstream effect, she suggested, of Washington taking its first overt step from holding seized BTC to competing in the open market.
At the time of writing, BTC was trading at $90,578.
Featured image from YouTube, chart from TradingView.com