The USA might not buy XRP and Cardano for the strategic reserve

On Sunday, Donald Trump had announced his intention to add XRP, Solana, and Cardano to the USA’s strategic reserve, in addition to Bitcoin and Ethereum. 

This immediately led the markets to consider the possibility that one of the consequences could be the purchase of XRP, SOL, and ADA on the crypto markets, but this hypothesis seems to be becoming less and less likely. 

The forecasts of Farcaster: XRP and Cardano will not be included in the strategic reserve of the USA

The co-founder of Farcaster, Dan Romero, yesterday wrote that he expects the US government’s cryptocurrency reserves will consist solely of seized assets, and not of assets purchased on the market.

Although these are only Romero’s personal opinions, it seems that the markets have taken them seriously. 

In fact, yesterday all the gains obtained by XRP, SOL, and ADA after the Sunday post by Trump were lost, including those on BTC and ETH.

Romero has done nothing but make evident a very widespread opinion among crypto experts, namely that it seems almost impossible for the US Congress to end up approving a law that effectively requires the USA to purchase altcoins on the markets.

Moreover, almost half of the existing XRP are still in the hands of Ripple, the private company that created this cryptocurrency. In the event that a law is passed authorizing the US government to purchase XRP on the market, there is a serious risk that it would effectively authorize the transfer of public money to a private company in exchange for essentially nothing, given that the XRP in Ripple’s hands are currently not in circulation. 

According to Romero, in the end, 80% of the crypto reserve could consist solely of Bitcoin, while XRP and Cardano could be included only if some citizen decides to make a tax payment in these crypto, or donations.

The accusations of Samson Mow

Other criticisms of Trump’s decision came from Samson Mow, CEO of Jan3.

On his profile, X wanted to warn Trump about his idea of including altcoin crypto in the strategic reserve in a “reckless” manner, because it could cause chaos and turn it into a purely speculative game. 

According to Mow, priority should be given to crypto based on PoW, such as BTC, LTC, and XMR.

The point in this case is precisely the speculative nature of altcoins in the crypto markets. 

In fact, although there is still a lot of speculation on Bitcoin, BTC is increasingly considered less of a purely speculative asset. However, this idea, now already quite widespread, concerns only BTC at this moment, so much so that even on ETH there are still several doubts from this point of view. 

For example, what happened to the price of SOL (Solana) over the past few months due to the boom of memecoins clearly shows how speculation still dominates the market of many altcoins. 

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The strategic reserve

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The fact is that, in theory, a strategic reserve should not be speculative at all.

In other words, if it is speculative it is not strategic. 

A strategic reserve is useful in case of problems, and in case of problems, speculative assets often end up being worth almost nothing, or in any case, losing a lot of value on the bull and bear markets. 

It is not a coincidence that the strategic asset par excellence is gold, as it tends not to lose value over time regardless of what happens.

Bitcoin is increasingly often considered a sort of digital gold risk-on, unlike gold which is risk-off, and this is why it can also be imagined as an alternative asset to gold to diversify a strategic reserve.

Note that currently the US government already holds about 200,000 BTC thanks to seizures carried out over the years by the Department of Justice, and if their value in dollars is about 16.5 billion dollars, that of their gold reserves amounts to even more than 450 billion.

If indeed the crypto reserve will contain only already seized tokens, as Romero hypothesizes, the strategic reserve in BTC will have a value equal to only 3.5% of the reserve in gold.