On Sept. 16, the U.S. House Financial Services Committee voted 28-21 to advance the 2026 U.S. Reserve Modernization Act, a bill that would write the federal strategic Bitcoin reserve into law and require the government to hold covered Bitcoin for at least 20 years.

The bill is designed to convert a strategic Bitcoin reserve established through a Trump executive order into statutory law. According to the disclosed summary, it would require the federal government to retain covered Bitcoin for at least 20 years, publish proof of reserves, accept independent audits, and study ways to increase Bitcoin holdings without raising taxes, expanding government borrowing, or widening the federal deficit.

Committee approval moves the measure to the next legislative stage, but it does not complete the process. The bill still faces votes in the full House and the Senate before it could become law. Deepening that distinction is important because an executive order can be reversed by a future administration, while congressional codification would make the reserve materially harder to unwind.

Available reporting indicates the measure is aimed chiefly at formalizing the treatment of Bitcoin already in federal hands, much of it from seizures and forfeitures, rather than authorizing immediate open-market purchases. Separate reporting has also described the bill as placing federally held Bitcoin under Treasury management and establishing rules for custody, transparency, and the handling of other federal digital-asset holdings.

Different sources describe the matter differently, and the relevant details still require official confirmation. That applies in particular to the exact scale of U.S. government Bitcoin holdings and to whether all descriptions attached to earlier versions of strategic reserve legislation match the committee-approved text. The original report cited Arkham Intelligence estimates of about 324,500 Bitcoin worth roughly $24.7 billion, but the government has not uniformly confirmed a single figure.

Why It Matters

This is one of the clearest signs yet that a U.S. strategic Bitcoin reserve is moving from executive policy toward a congressional framework. The shift matters because it changes the debate from whether the federal government can hold Bitcoin to how those holdings would be governed, audited, disclosed, and protected over time.

For the broader crypto market, the significance is less about an immediate change in demand and more about sovereign treatment of Bitcoin as a reserve asset. A legal framework for long-term federal custody could influence how other governments, institutions, and regulators approach digital-asset reserves, transparency standards, and the boundary between Bitcoin and other crypto assets.