Trump crypto reserve risks undermining Congress’ industry-friendly plans #CriptoNews

Even cryptocurrency backers haven’t fully bought in to President Donald Trump’s latest plan to boost digital assets.

The president sent the multitrillion-dollar crypto market soaring Sunday by announcing he’ll create a US “strategic reserve” of digital assets that includes Bitcoin and Ethereum, as well as more niche tokens like Ripple’s XRP, Solana’s SOL and Cardano’s ADA. Because Trump previously backed a Bitcoin-only stockpile — which wouldn’t require the government to buy new crypto — his shift caught some pro-crypto lawmakers and industry allies off-guard.

Now, Republicans and Democrats who hope to legitimize crypto by pushing regulatory overhauls through Congress are scrambling to come to terms with Trump’s proposal. Private-sector supporters are raising their own concerns that the reserve plan cheapens their ongoing effort to sway the Hill.

And experts warn that creating a reserve, as opposed to a narrower stockpile, would likely require congressional approval.

“I don’t mind the concept. I just don’t know what utility it serves,” Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., told Semafor. “And I don’t like the fact that law enforcement could be negatively impacted in terms of future flows for asset forfeitures,” he added, by having to turn over government-seized crypto.

The skepticism about Trump’s reserve pitch comes ahead of the White House’s much-touted crypto summit with industry leaders — and just as Congress nears a potential breakthrough on bipartisan legislation that crypto players have long sought. The Senate Banking Committee is eyeing a vote next week on a Republican bill that would create rules for stablecoins, or tokens pegged to assets like the US dollar, a person familiar with the plans said.

And Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand, D-N.Y., and Cynthia Lummis, R-Wyo., are actively exploring how to attach their proposed overhaul of crypto income taxation to Republicans’ party-line tax plan, Gillibrand said. But she warned that Trump’s reserve announcement is “unhelpful — deeply unhelpful” to those talks.

“What President Trump proposed was very dangerous and very problematic,” Gillibrand, one of the crypto industry’s most loyal allies, told Semafor. She added that buying tokens like XRP and SOL is like proposing the government purchase stock in a publicly traded company.

Much of the pushback has come from within the industry itself, where there’s bristling at Trump’s apparent willingness to elevate certain tokens but not others — as well as the possibility that the US could acquire enough crypto to begin to manipulate the market. The latter could approach the creation of a de facto central bank digital currency.

“For Bitcoin, I think people generally understand that this is the most decentralized — it’s very clear that no one person owns it, it’s very clear that no one person is making decisions or this is benefiting any one entity,” one industry representative told Semafor. “But the further you get down the stack, the more complicated it is.”

Tillis raised his own separate question about the core purpose behind the plan: “It’s not like we would rely on Bitcoin currency,” he said. “We have petroleum reserves for a reason — for an obvious reason. I don’t know how that maps into this.”

The White House declined a request for comment.