Bitcoin, Not Crypto: Strategic Reserves and Sound Money
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Cliff-Notes:
- The US builds reserves of assets with enduring strategic value—oil, gold, Treasuries. Bitcoin fits the mold. Altcoins do not.
- Trump’s proposal to include XRP, SOL, and ADA in a US reserve is pure marketing, not geopolitical strategy.
- Bitcoin’s monetization is inevitable, but affinity scammers will always try to ride its coattails. The right response? Help more people understand the difference.
Check out today's Theya Research post in video form 👇
Donald Trump just announced a "U.S. Crypto Reserve", including a hodgepodge of altcoins that haven’t made or held new highs in several years.
This is not a step toward a legitimate Strategic Bitcoin Reserve for the United States—it’s paid marketing disguised as policy, and yet another attempt to conflate bitcoin with affinity scams that have nothing in common with it:
The entire point of a reserve is to stockpile assets of enduring value to protect our national interests, hedge against fiscal and monetary crises, and provide stability during financial and geopolitical turbulence. The US doesn’t build reserves to speculate—it builds them to secure our footing on the global stage and ensure resilience in times of crisis.
The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) exists because energy security is national security. The SPR is an emergency buffer, designed to be deployed in wartime and economic emergencies. When geopolitical conflicts or supply chain disruptions threaten global oil markets, the US can release millions of barrels into the economy, stabilizing prices and reducing inflationary pressure on fuel and goods.
The United States' gold reserve—the largest in the world—also holds strategic importance. Functioning as the ultimate monetary hedge for centuries, as fiat currencies lose purchasing power thanks to reckless monetary policy, gold largely retains its value thanks to its relative scarcity. Even though US dollars are no longer redeemable for gold at the US Treasury, the reserve serves as a confidence anchor, of sorts. A psychological reinforcement for the layman on the credibility of the financial system, especially in times of economic uncertainty.
Our US Treasury holdings are even more critical. USTs are the foundation of the modern financial system, serving as the colloquially "risk-free" collateral for global lending. Every major financial institution, foreign government, and central bank holds Treasuries on their balance sheet and in FX reserves. The liquidity and widespread use of USTs in the modern global economy make them indispensable; hence their strategic importance on the Fed's balance sheet.
Every one of these reserves has a clear strategic function: to secure national interests, mitigate risk, and ensure economic stability—not to build a portfolio of highly speculative assets. If the US were to build a digital asset reserve, it would have to follow this same logic, which is why bitcoin is the only asset that makes sense.
Bitcoin serves a similar strategic function to gold, but is superior to each of gold's monetary attributes. Where gold is relatively scarce due to its supply response to increased demand, bitcoin's supply schedule is fixed, with an absolutely scarce 21M-unit supply. It is the most liquid and neutral monetary asset on earth, trading 24/7 with deep order books and near-instant settlement. It is free from counterparty risk, centralized control, and arbitrary monetary policy. If the US were serious about holding digital assets in a reserve, this is where the conversation starts and ends.
Instead, we get XRP, Solana, and Cardano tacked onto the announcement like they’re of equal importance. They aren’t. The inclusion of these affinity tokens exposes Trump's post as a naked, shameless marketing campaign wrapped in a policy announcement.
These assets are not money. They are not decentralized. They are not used as stores of value. Their founders pre-mined between 50% and 100% of the supply prior to selling to retail investors. Their track records are a mix of centralized control, VC-backed market manipulation, and frequent downtime—not exactly the kind of thing a sovereign nation would build a reserve around.
XRP is controlled by Ripple, a private company that prints and distributes the supply at will and is currently trying to convince the world that its token has a legitimate use case beyond speculation. The SEC didn’t target them by accident.
Solana is a venture capital darling that has gone offline multiple times under stress and has no fixed supply schedule, meaning it can be inflated at will. If the US wanted a centrally controlled, high-risk, illiquid tech project in its reserve, it might as well buy shares in a startup.
Cardano has almost no institutional footprint, no meaningful adoption, and no liquidity outside of retail speculation. There are days when Dogecoin has a higher market cap than ADA. It’s especially hard to take its inclusion seriously.
None of these assets are neutral, trustless, immutable, or hold any strategic importance whatsoever—all core requirements for a United States reserve asset.
If the US were actually planning to create a digital reserve, it would not be stacking bags of VC-funded pump-and-dumps. It would buy the one asset that is provably scarce, decentralized, and resistant to seizure or inflation. So why did Trump make a post dedicated to namedropping these three tokens?
Herein lies the answer: according to Grant McCarty, Co-President of the Bitcoin Policy Institute, bitcoin accounts for 60% of the total "crypto" market cap, yet less than 10% of total "crypto" lobbying and education spending in Washington is bitcoin-focused.
That imbalance has consequences. It means politicians are being fed "crypto" industry talking points instead of economic realities, leading to the announcement of a “US Crypto Reserve” that looks more like a venture capital exit strategy than a serious policy discussion. That is how these tokens ended up in this statement from the President of the United States. It wasn’t organic, it was a billion-dollar lobbying effort designed to manufacture legitimacy for an asset with no real monetary utility or user base.
A potential US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, spearheaded by Senator Cynthia Lummis and her BITCOIN Act of 2024, is a serious conversation. A "US Crypto Reserve" full of illiquid, centralized venture projects is a grift.
Bitcoin doesn’t need US government backing to succeed. It is monetizing with or without state recognition. Institutions, sovereigns, and asset managers are already allocating at scale. The spot ETF-driven demand for bitcoin has become one of the most durable buy-side forces in bitcoin's 16-year history. There is no precedent for this level of sustained capital inflows into a relatively nascent asset.
Bitcoin is winning, and bitcoin will win, but this situation exposes an ongoing problem—bad information still outpaces good information. The altcoin industry thrives on affinity marketing, grift, and political opportunism. And as bitcoin continues to monetize on its way to a $450-trillion asset, the opportunistic grift will scale right alongside it.
Rather than whine about it, let's learn to recognize it. Their playbook is as follows:
- Retail money enters the space, looking for “the next bitcoin.”
- Altcoin promoters attach themselves to bitcoin’s success, building a narrative and conflating their token with BTC.
- Policymakers, most of whom don’t understand the difference between bitcoin and "crypto", accept donations from these altcoin promoters in exchange for their recitation of industry talking points.
- Retail gets wrecked. Regulators right the ship. Bitcoin’s reputation takes collateral damage.
The only way to stop the cycle is to scale education faster than bad information spreads.
Bitcoin advocates need to channel the anger and frustration they feel towards affinity scams into louder delineation between bitcoin and "crypto". Bitcoin’s monetary superiority will prove itself in time, but lagging policy and education have real consequences for people who don’t yet understand the difference.
At the end of the day, bitcoin wins—but, along the way, we need to scale our education efforts on "bitcoin, not crypto" so we can prevent as many people and institutions as possible from falling victim to these scams.
Bitcoin advocates, it's on us. Get out there and make it happen.
Take it easy,
Joe Consorti
Theya is the simplest way to take full control of your bitcoin. With our flexible multi-sig vaults, you decide how to secure your keys.
Whether you prefer keeping all keys offline, shared custody with trusted contacts, or robust mobile vaults across multiple devices, it's always Your Keys, Your Bitcoin.