Crypto Czar David Sacks Says Stablecoin Bill and Bitcoin Reserve are Priorities

At a press conference in Washington today, House and Senate leaders joined by AI and Crypto Czar David Sacks said that a stablecoin bill is likely to be the first piece of crypto legislation to hit President Donald Trump’s desk, and that exploring a potential Bitcoin reserve is a priority.

Sen. Bill Hagerty (R-Tenn.) introduced a stablecoin bill today. Sen. Tim Scott (R-S.C.), chair of the Senate Banking Committee, said he plans to try to move that bill through Congress before a larger crypto market structure bill. But he added that he hopes to have both on the President’s desk within the administration’s first 100 days.

In part, he said, that could be possible because both pieces of legislation have had bipartisan support in the past session of Congress. Sen. Scott pointed out that the market structure bill being worked on in the Senate will be a bipartisan one continuing the work that Sen. Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) did in the Senate and the FIT 21 legislation that passed in a bipartisan vote in the House last year.

As for Sacks, he said that a priority of the crypto working group of cabinet secretaries and agency heads he leads will be investigating a Bitcoin Reserve.

“We're still in the very early stages of this, but one of the first things we're going to look at is the feasibility of a Bitcoin Reserve,” he said, adding that the sovereign wealth fund announced by President Trump this week is a “separate” issue.

Stablecoins First

Sen. Hagerty’s bill includes reserve requirements, “light-touch” regulatory standards and establishes “supervisory, examination and enforcement regimes.”

The controversy will likely come from the provision that calls for issuers of more than $10 billion in stablecoins to be overseen by federal regulators. States would be allowed to regulate stablecoins under $10 billion, something Democrats have been wary of for years.

Sacks emphasized how important stablecoins are to the administration, saying they “really have the potential to ensure American dollar dominance internationally, to increase the usage of the U.S. dollar digitally as the world's reserve currency, and in the process, create potentially trillions of dollars of demand for U.S. Treasuries, which could lower long term interest rates.”

Clear Regulation

A broader crypto regulatory structure remains key, Sacks and others said.

“I've talked to many founders over the past few years, and they've told me repeatedly that the number one thing they need from Washington is regulatory clarity,” he said. “They just want to know what the rules of the road are so they can abide by them. We're coming off, frankly, four years of arbitrary prosecution and persecution of crypto companies, where the Securities and Exchange Commission wouldn't tell founders what the rules were, but then they would prosecute them.”

Saying the biggest effect of this was to drive crypto innovation offshore, Sacks added, “financial assets are destined to become digital, just like every analog industry has become digital, and we want that value creation to happen in the United States, rather than giving it away to other countries.”

Having crypto companies in the U.S. will also be better for consumer protection, he said, pointing out that Sam Bankman-Fried’s bankrupt FTX exchange was based in The Bahamas.