A strategic bitcoin reserve has been a big part of the crypto discussion ahead of Donald Trump’s inauguration, but does the incoming 47th president have other tokens in mind?
Solana’s SOL, Ripple’s XRP and Heder’s HBAR are among the altcoins to outperform on Thursday, thanks in part to a NYPost report that Trump was “receptive” to the idea of creating an “America-first strategic reserve” of tokens including SOL, XRP and Circle’s USDC stablecoin.
SOL jumped over 8% to $217 after the report, while XRP continued this week’s advance to reach $3.35, just shy of its 2018 record price, as of data source CoinGecko. HBAR, the native symbol of the Hedera Hashgraph network founded by the pseudonymous Texas-based company, was not mentioned in the story, but rose more than 10% to its strongest price since early December.
That has led the CoinDesk 20 index to a 5% gain over the past 24 hours, outpacing bitcoin’s 0.5% rise to just $100,000.
Anticipation among crypto investors is building for Trump’s inauguration next week and the potential announcement of first-day orders focused on the digital asset industry. Trump promised during the campaign to position the United States as a leader in the crypto space, including creating a national repository of bitcoin. Senator Cynthia Lummis also introduced the BITCOIN Act in July, proposing to acquire 5% of bitcoin’s supply, while some US states are also exploring or have proposed legislation to create a reserve for the asset.
Not so fast
While some token holders may be salivating over the idea of the government buying cryptos other than bitcoin, market observers raised concerns.
“This is a ridiculous idea and will never happen,” Quinn Thompson, founder of hedge fund Lekker Capital, said in an X post.
“It’s not the government’s place to bet venture capital on altcoins,” Thompson elaborated to CoinDesk. “This rumor about a strategic reserve for other non-BTC coins is another example of people taking what is otherwise a bad idea and running with it as fact.”
Anthony Georgiades, general partner of investment firm Innovating Capital, said that while it is “extremely positive” to promote US-based innovation, the potential “nationalization of digital assets” could weaken efforts to decentralize blockchain economies.
“As it stands today, there’s really only one token that’s sufficiently and purely decentralized, and that’s bitcoin,” he said in an interview on the CoinDesk Markets Daily show. “These other projects all have the fundamental strengths and capabilities toward a path to that level of decentralized ethos. This nationalization of digital assets could potentially weaken those efforts over time.”
Read more: Why Litecoin could be the next crypto to get its ETF
