The U.S. Treasury Department held meetings this week with top executives from three crypto custody firms to discuss safeguarding the country’s Strategic Bitcoin Reserve, sources familiar with the matter told Decrypt.
Anchorage Digital was one such custodian that met with Treasury Department officials on Monday, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the matter.
When asked about the meeting, Anchorage CEO Nathan McCauley told Decrypt that government officials asked him detailed questions about best practices for custodying a national Bitcoin reserve and digital asset stockpile. McCauley said the officials also inquired about how custody could impact stablecoins and market structure, two hot-button topics currently before Congress.
“The Treasury Department is asking all the right questions,” the Anchorage CEO told Decrypt. “It’s clear that Treasury officials are treating this move into the digital asset space with care, recognizing that the United States is quite literally writing history.”
The Treasury Department did not respond to a request for comment on this story.
A Capitol Hill source with knowledge of the meetings told Decrypt the Treasury Department is in the early stages of figuring out how best to tackle questions of security involved in the U.S. government indefinitely holding billions of dollars worth of digital assets.
“I don’t think they have a view yet, and they’re trying to figure out what their view is going to be,” they said. “But they are actively seeking additional information from industry participants on the best way to custody the strategic reserve and the stockpile.”
The source elaborated that key decision makers in the industry appear to be in favor of one or multiple third parties assisting with custodying the U.S. government’s Bitcoin reserve in the interim, with the long-term goal of the government eventually self-custodying when ready. Self custody refers to the practice of independently holding crypto in cold wallets accessed with private keys, as opposed to relying on third parties to manage the assets.
The national digital assets stockpile, however, will consist of a wide variety of seized crypto assets on various blockchain networks, and therefore will likely be permanently custodied by a third party.
How are the nearly 200,000 BTC in the government’s possession currently being held? Last summer, the U.S. Marshals Service announced it had tapped Coinbase to custody its large cap digital asset holdings.
When asked by Decrypt whether the company currently custodies the U.S. government’s Bitcoin, however, a Coinbase representative declined comment, pointing only to a recent, vague X post on the subject by Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong.
In the post, Armstrong boasts that his company “works with 145 government entities in the U.S. and 29 government entities outside the U.S.” and that Coinbase has seen increased interest in its custody services following President Donald Trump’s announcement establishing a Bitcoin Reserve.
During an event in Washington held Tuesday by the Bitcoin Policy Institute, BitGo CEO Mike Belshe, Casa CEO Nick Neuman, and Anchorage Digital’s Nathan McCauley convened a panel on “Safeguarding America’s Bitcoin.”
During the talk, the executives opined as to the current state of the government’s current BTC stash, which is worth some $16.4 billion at writing.
“It’s maybe sitting in a closet at the U.S. Marshals Office,” Casa’s Neuman said.
“Or in a drive at somebody’s desk,” BitGo’s Mike Belshe added.
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