Nobody knows whether America’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve will grow beyond its current limits, and that includes the people supposedly in charge of it.
BTC hit a new all-time high of $124,128 on Wednesday, spurred by (a) rumors that a new ‘treasury’ firm was buying up hundreds of millions of dollars’ worth of the tokens, and (b) suggestions that Washington planned a new round of ‘quantitative easing,’ aka flooding the system with new money to give the flagging economy a lift.
But the euphoria was short-lived, as BTC dropped below $118,000 by early Thursday. The buzzkill was blamed on a variety of factors, including higher than expected inflation figures dashing hopes of a cut in U.S. interest rates.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent’s Thursday morning appearance on Fox Business didn’t help, as he emphatically ruled out the possibility that the federal government will use its bottomless checkbook to buy more BTC for the country’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.
The Reserve concept was announced in March, along with a separate Digital Asset Stockpile to be comprised of tokens other than BTC. The foundations of each were to be based on tokens already in the government’s possession through seizures and forfeitures, but the feds left open the possibility of adding additional BTC to the Reserve if it could be done in a ‘budget-neutral’ fashion.
In July, the White House released a report prepared by the President’s Working Group on Digital Assets (aka the ‘crypto council’) detailing a number of policy proposals. But the 166-page document contained no new information regarding any BTC acquisition plans, leaving BTC maximalists crestfallen, as government purchases were expected to light a fire under BTC’s fiat value.
On Thursday, Bessent referenced the Reserve and clarified that the government was “not going to be buying that, but we are going to use confiscated assets and continue to build that up.” Bessent somewhat cushioned this blow by adding that the government was “going to stop selling” any BTC already in its possession. Bessent claimed the Reserve’s BTC was worth “somewhere between $15 billion and $20 billion.”
However, after his comments caused much gnashing of teeth among BTC maxis, Bessent tweeted that Treasury is “committed to exploring budget-neutral pathways to acquire more Bitcoin to expand the reserve, and to execute on the President’s promise to make the United States the ‘Bitcoin superpower of the world.’” In other words, nobody knows anything, not even the people running this show. As you were.
Ahead of the release of the White House report, Working Group exec director Bo Hines had on multiple occasions offered vague allusions to government efforts to identify ‘budget neutral’ BTC acquisition methods. But on August 9, Hines announced that he was stepping down from the Working Group based on his desire to “return to the private sector.”
Hines later told Crypto in America that he was “confident” the budget-neutral efforts to build the Reserve “will continue and accelerate” under his replacement, deputy director Patrick Witt. Like Hines, Witt is a former college football player and a failed GOP Congressional candidate. Also like Hines, Witt has yet to offer any specifics on how the Reserve might grow beyond its current confines.
Bullish Global bulls over skeptics in Nasdaq debut
On August 13, Bullish Global (NASDAQ: BLSH) made its debut on the Nasdaq after twice upsizing its expected returns. Initially looking to raise $629 million, this was quickly boosted to $990 million before settling on $1.1 billion at a value of $37 per share. The initial public offering (IPO) price gives Bullish a valuation of $5.4 billion.
Shares in Bullish, which operates the digital asset exchange of the same name as well as the Coindesk media outlet, rose as high as high as $118 before closing Wednesday’s trading at $70, nearly doubling its IPO price. The gains continued on Thursday, closing at $74.63.
Investor excitement over Bullish mirrors that of other recent crypto IPOs like USDC stablecoin-issuer Circle (NASDAQ: CRCL), which more than doubled its share price on its opening day (although that price has fallen by nearly one-third over the past month). This has other crypto operators who are preparing their own IPOs salivating like hungry dogs in expectation of some major bones thrown their way.
This category includes the Gemini and Kraken exchanges and payment/trading platform Uphold, although other prospective filers are more likely to come off the bench and declare their intentions.
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Justin Sun sues Bloomberg
Not all crypto IPOs have surpassed expectations. TRON, the stock representing the blockchain of the same name, stumbled out of the gate in late July. While the stock briefly soared before closing its opening day at $8.74, the shares closed Thursday down 2.5% to $6.98.
TRON is controlled by Justin Sun, a controversial figure who revealed this week that he’s suing the Bloomberg news agency for publishing details of his vast crypto wealth.
The suit, filed on August 11 in the U.S. District Court of the District of Delaware, seeks to stop Bloomberg from “recklessly and improperly disclosing [Sun’s] highly confidential, sensitive, private, and proprietary financial information.” Sun alleges that he will “suffer significant and irreparable harm—both financially and physically—if this sensitive financial information is published.”
Sun’s attorneys claim Bloomberg journo Muyao Shen contacted him in February regarding their annual Billionaires Index of the world’s richest people. Sun claims to have received “explicit assurances” that the financial information he supplied would be held “strictly confidential.”
Sun claims to have “understood, based on Ms. Shen’s assurances, that his cryptocurrency holdings would be reported as a single lump sum amount.” But on July 29, Sun’s team was sent an advance draft of his Billionaires Index profile that contained “the specific amounts of cryptocurrencies owned” by Sun.
Sun’s team sent Bloomberg a cease-and-desist letter, claiming that publishing the data will allow “bad actors” to identify his digital wallets and make him a “considerable target” for theft, extortion, and physical attack. Sun’s team sought a temporary restraining order (TRO), as well as preliminary and permanent injunctions to prevent Bloomberg from publishing Sun’s data.
Bloomberg’s attorneys filed a response with the court on August 12, calling Sun’s action “moot” because the media outlet wasn’t sent Sun’s notice of the TRO until two hours after it published the information. Regardless, Bloomberg says it will fight Sun’s “prior restraint” efforts, saying Sun failed to show irreparable harm, that a TRO would “gravely disserve the public interest,” and “the law and the facts are clear that Bloomberg breached no promise to him.”
Sun’s team filed a transcript of a group chat involving his minions and Bloomberg journos, in which Sun tries to impose strict limits (after the fact) on how the outlet can use the data he supplied. However, Bloomberg writer Tom Maloney states in this chat that “nobody at Bloomberg agreed to the terms sent by Justin, weeks after the data was shared with us.”
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So what’s Justin worth?
For the record, Bloomberg puts Sun’s net worth at $12.3 billion, a sum that was over $1 billion higher when the year began. However, Bloomberg’s ‘confidence rating’ in these figures ranked a mere single star out of a possible five.
At any rate, Sun’s token haul is said to include 60 billion TRX (Tron’s native token), to which Bloomberg applied a 75% liquidity discount “because Sun controls the majority [over 60%] of its supply.” Sun also owns ~17,000 BTC, ~224,000 ETH, and 700,000 USDT (Tether). Bloomberg notes that it didn’t include tokens held on exchanges because these couldn’t be verified.
Sun also owns 90% of the HTX exchange “based on information provided by his representatives in May 2025.” This is notable because Sun has repeatedly denied ownership of HTX (formerly Huobi), claiming he’s only an adviser. Sun also acquired the BitTorrent file-sharing platform in 2014 for $140 million.
The TRON DAO issued a blog post on August 12 that largely rehashes the TRO application claims, while adding a complaint that Bloomberg’s reporting “attributes to Mr. Sun cryptocurrency holdings he has never owned, controlled or had any beneficial interest in, and fails to report cryptocurrency holdings he does own.” For instance, “the value of Mr. Sun’s holdings of BTC is multiples of TRX.” Good to know.
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Trumps still not over being debanked
Bloomberg didn’t include any reference to Sun’s $75 million worth of WLFI, the governance token of the Trump-linked decentralized finance (DeFi) project World Liberty Financial (WLF). A recent vote by WLFI holders has cleared the way for the token to be tradable on both centralized and decentralized exchanges (DEX), possibly as early as the end of this month.
The recent $1.5 billion deal between WLF and ALT5 Sigma put the first public valuation on WLFI at around 20¢, a 13x premium on its initial selling price of 1.5¢. At that multiple, Sun’s $75 million WLFI haul could be worth closer to $1 billion.
While rumors of the ALT5-WLF deal sent ALT5’s stock soaring last week, the shares quickly surrendered those gains and then some, falling to $5.90. The shares closed Thursday at $7.21, up 3.6% from Wednesday, but only slightly higher than their pre-rumor price.
President Trump’s sons, Eric and Don Jr., are both WLF co-founders and Eric was named a director of ALT5 as part of their deal. The two Trumps rang the Nasdaq’s opening bell on Wednesday after visiting Fox News with fellow WLF co-founder Zach Witkoff to discuss their blockbuster deal, which will see ALT5 buy 7.5% of the total supply of WLFI as part of its new ‘treasury’ strategy.
Don Jr. seemed less interested in talking up WLF/ALT5 than discussing the alleged ‘debanking’ that the Trump family endured following the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, and how this pushed the family into the arms of crypto.
Eric claimed Capital One “stripped 300 bank accounts from me … after doing business for 20-something years … this happened across the board.” Eric singled out JPMorgan Chase (NASDAQ: JPM), Bank of America (BOA), and First Republic as among those who targeted not only the Trump family for debanking but “conservatives all over the country.”
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De-debanking is never really over
With a personal stake in this matter, President Trump was only too eager to issue an executive order this month prohibiting federal agencies from enacting policies that allow banks to “deny or restrict services” to, well, anybody. The order was a bit redundant, given that federal financial regulators had already rescinded the guidance that permitted institutions to refuse clients based on ‘reputational risk.’
This regulatory dragon slain, the debanking posse turned its attention to a new threat: banks looking to impose new fees for accessing customer account data. Recent weeks have seen JPMorgan announce plans to impose fees on data aggregators who serve as bank-to-fintech bridges and who’ve previously enjoyed fee-free access to this customer information.
A joint effort by the fintech/crypto sectors appeared to have convinced the Trump administration to halt plans to relax the rules that would have permitted JPMorgan and other banks to impose the fees. But like horror movie fans who’ve seen the supposedly vanquished villain suddenly rise from the dead, JPMorgan’s foes want to make sure these fees stay down for the count.
This week saw further pleas to President Trump by a long list of supplicants—including Gemini, Kraken, PayPal (NASDAQ: PYPL), Stripe, Robinhood (NASDAQ: HOOD), Swedish fintech Klarna Group and representatives of venture capital groups Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Paradigm—urging him to “use the full power of your office and the broader administration to prevent the largest institutions from raising new barriers to financial freedom.”
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Google wanders into crypto wallet minefield
Finally, crypto operators continue to lobby the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on how best to implement its Project Crypto list of proposed reforms of U.S. securities rules. Among the recent filings was a joint submission by a16z and the DeFi Education Fund that seeks a ‘safe harbor’ for DeFi developers from the broker registration requirements of U.S. securities law.
The submission singles out devs involved in “certain trading interfaces provided via a website or application that enable users to interact with blockchains and smart contract protocols.” Specifically, apps “that function as technical infrastructure that enable users to arrange transactions themselves.”
Given that this definition includes non-custodial wallets, you can imagine the collective crypto freakout on August 13, when Google (NASDAQ: GOOGL) abruptly announced that digital wallet apps would only be allowed in the Google Play marketplace “if the app complies with local laws and industry standards.”
For U.S. wallet apps, that meant developers “must be either (a) registered with FinCEN [the Treasury Department’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network] as a Money Services Business and with a state as a money transmitter or (b) a federal or state chartered bank entity.”
DeFi’s perpetual martyrs quickly broke out their social media pitchforks and torches, claiming that Operation ChokePoint 3.0 was underway and urging President Trump to unleash Seal Team Six on Google’s executive headquarters. A suitably chastened Google swiftly issued a clarification that non-custodial wallets were “out of scope” of these new rules.
Breathing easier today are Gemini founders Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss, who just launched a self-custodial wallet ahead of the launch of its new DeFi platform, Gemini Onchain. Nobody tell Google.
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Watch: RockWallet is the go-to app for everyone
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Source: https://coingeek.com/confusion-over-us-btc-reserve-google-digital-wallet-rules/