- Trump has revealed the cryptocurrencies that will be used in his government’s national crypto reserve.
- XRP, Solana, Cardano, Bitcoin and Ether will make up the stockpile.
- The United States hopes to use the stockpile to bail it out if it ever needs a large amount of cash quickly.
One of the big promises in Trump’s campaign to win back the presidency was to establish a national cryptocurrency stockpile, comprised of tokens confiscated by the US government with the hopes of using the stockpile to bail the government out when it requires huge amounts of cash quickly.
Now, months after announcing the stockpile, Trump announced on his social media platform the five crypto tokens that will comprise the reserve. These are XRP, Solana, Cardano and of course, Bitcoin and Etherium.
These tokens will now be the basis for the reserve which will see the US government funnel all cryptocurrency it has seized from individuals, like dark web hackers groups, for example, into essentially a digital blockchain where different tokens will be stored.
In his post on Truth Social, the US President said that “other valuable Cryptocurrencies, will be at the heart of the Reserve.” The declaration, though seemingly insignificant boosted the price of Bitcoin, the largest and most important cryptocurrency in the world by more than 11 percent on Sunday.
Ethereum, the second largest cryptocurrency was up about 13 percent following the news. Analysts believe the rest of the crypto market was up by 10 percent translating to the addition of $300 billion in the hours since the announcement, per a Reuters report.
It follows weeks of a sharp decline in cryptocurrency prices across the board. Some of the largest tokens were down so much that gains made following the initial excitement when Trump returned to office were completely erased pointing the extremely volatile and unpredictable nature of crypto assets.
This summons up questions like: what if the US wants to use the crypto reserve to fund support for victims of a national disaster, but it just so happens the disaster takes place during a time period when crypto prices are low?
While Trump continues to position himself as the crypto president, the vast majority of the buyers of his own crypto tokens have lost considerable amounts of money since he took office. The disastrous collapse of the $Trump meme coin saw 800 000 investors of the token lose a total of $2 billion in less than two months.
While a small number of super early investors who bought into the coin almost immediately made millions, these profits “came at the expense of a far larger number of slower investors who have cumulatively suffered more than $2 billion in losses after the price of the token crashed,” a report from The New York Times read.
The situation had Corey Frayer, a former crypto adviser to the Securities and Exchange Commission say that “The president is participating in shady crypto schemes.”
