The House Financial Services Committee voted 28-21 to advance the American Reserve Modernization Act, the furthest any bill to codify the US Strategic Bitcoin Reserve has gotten in Congress. The measure, H.R. 8957, would write President Trump’s March 2025 executive order into federal law and bar the government from selling its bitcoin for two decades.
What the bill does
The legislation directs the Treasury Department to maintain a secure bitcoin storage facility and to keep every coin it holds. Under the text, the government cannot sell, swap, auction, or pledge any of the holdings for 20 years. The US government currently holds an estimated 328,372 BTC, worth roughly $28.2 billion at current prices, which makes it the largest known state holder of bitcoin in the world.
A parallel Senate bill, the BITCOIN Act sponsored by Senator Cynthia Lummis, would go further. It directs Treasury to actively purchase one million BTC over five years, funded through accounting adjustments at the Federal Reserve and gold certificates. The House bill stops short of new purchases and instead locks in what the government already has.
Market reaction
Bitcoin held near $86,900 in Wednesday Asian trading, up about 1% over 24 hours, and traders credited the committee vote along with a separate SEC move. Zcash led major tokens with a 10% gain to just above $1,616. XRP added 6% to $1.62, Hyperliquid’s HYPE rose 4% to nearly $97, and dogecoin picked up 4%. Ether, BNB, and Solana each gained under 1%. Only TRX fell among large tokens, down 1%.
The rally also drew support from falling oil prices, which eased inflation worries and lifted bonds through the Asian session. The yen weakened after the Bank of Japan’s divided rate increase, which traders read as a gradual path toward tighter policy rather than a shock.
How far it still has to go
The bill now heads toward a full House vote, and it would need Senate passage and the president’s signature to become law. Tony Dicarlo, director of institutional propositions at RootstockLabs, told CoinDesk the vote has reignited the strategic reserve conversation but cautioned that the road remains long.
“The American Reserve Modernization Act clearing committee last week has also reignited the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve conversation again, the furthest such a bill has gotten in Congress, though it still needs a full House and Senate vote,” Dicarlo said.
Dicarlo also pointed to the SEC’s innovation exemption, which cleared a path for onchain trading of tokenized US stocks within a day. With the CLARITY Act stalled in the Senate, the regulator has stepped in where Congress has not, and tokenization-linked tokens rallied on the news.
Context for the vote
Trump ordered the creation of a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve in March 2025, seeded with bitcoin seized in federal enforcement actions. The executive order left the stockpile on uncertain legal footing, since a future administration could rescind it with a pen stroke. Codification would change that. A statute requiring a 20-year holding period would bind future administrations in a way an order cannot.
Critics on the committee’s minority side argued the government should not sit on a volatile asset, and some questioned why a storage facility requires federal statute when the Treasury already custodies seized assets. The 28-21 margin suggests the measure has real support but not the kind of overwhelming majority that guarantees Senate action this year.
Bitcoin has posted gains in July and August and looks set to end September higher, which would mark a three-month winning streak last seen in 2012, according to CoinDesk. The reserve bill is one more piece of demand-side narrative on top of record ETF inflows, which hit $999 million on Monday, the best single day of 2026.
For now, the market’s read is simple. A bill that forbids the largest state holder from selling for 20 years removes a tail risk that has hung over every bull market since the seized-silk-road coins first appeared on government wallets. Whether it becomes law this session is another question.
Where the coins sit today
Most of the federal stack came from seizures tied to the Silk Road marketplace and the 2016 Bitfinex hack, with the Justice Department periodically auctioning portions off in years past. That practice ended under the March 2025 order, which instructed agencies to move forfeited bitcoin into the reserve rather than liquidate it. Court filings and blockchain researchers put the government wallets at roughly 328,000 coins, though no official audit has ever confirmed the exact figure, and some coins tied to ongoing cases remain outside Treasury control.
The bill 20-year lockup would also settle an open question about what happens to coins recovered in future enforcement actions. As written, the statute sweeps them into the same storage facility under the same no-sale rule, which effectively converts every federal crypto seizure into a permanent addition to the reserve.
What analysts are watching
Traders will look for a full House floor schedule in the coming weeks. A vote before the end of September would put the bill in the Senate during a crowded pre-election calendar, and Senate leadership has given no indication it will take up the measure this session. The Lummis purchase bill faces longer odds, since it commits the government to buying roughly 90 billion dollars of bitcoin at current prices, a number appropriators have so far refused to entertain.
ETF flows remain the more immediate demand signal. US spot bitcoin funds took in 999 million dollars on Monday, the strongest day of 2026, and the products have now attracted five consecutive sessions of net inflows. Strategy, the largest corporate holder, bought another 950 BTC this week and disclosed nearly 30 billion dollars in unrealized gains. Against that backdrop, the reserve bill is less a near-term catalyst than a structural argument: one more large holder credibly removed from the sell side.