Solana, XRP Jump as Trump Reportedly Mulls 'America-First' Strategic Crypto Reserve, but Experts Suggest Otherwise 
2025-01-17
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A strategic bitcoin reserve has been a large part of the crypto discussion ahead of Donald Trump's inauguration, but does the incoming 47th president have other tokens on his mind?
Solana's SOL, Ripple's XRP and Hedera's HBAR are among the altcoins outperforming on Thursday, in part thanks 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 following the report, while XRP continued this week's advance to hit $3.35, just shy of its 2018 record price, per data source CoinGecko. HBAR, the native token of the Hedera Hashgraph network founded by the pseudonymous Texas-based firm, wasn't mentioned in the story, but rallied more than 10% to its strongest price since early December.
That's led the CoinDesk 20 Index to a 5% gain over the past 24 hours, sharply outperforming bitcoin's 0.5% rise to just shy of $100,000.
Anticipation among crypto investors is building for Trump's inauguration next week, and the potential announcement of first-day executive orders focusing on the digital asset industry. Trump promised during the campaign to position the U.S. as a leader in the crypto space including creating a national stockpile of bitcoin. Senator Cynthia Lummis also introduced the BITCOIN Act in July proposing to acquire the 5% of bitcoin's supply, while some U.S. states are also exploring or have put forward legislation to create a reserve for the asset.
Not so fast
While some token holders might 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 be making venture capital bets on altcoins," Thompson elaborated to CoinDesk. "This rumor of a strategic reserve for other, non-BTC coins is another example of where people are taking what otherwise is a bad idea and running with it as fact."
Anthony Georgiades, general partner of investment firm Innovating Capital, said while it's "extremely positive" to promote U.S.-based innovation, the potential "nationalization of digital assets" could weaken efforts to decentralize blockchain economies.
"As it stands today, there's truly only one token that is sufficiently and purely decentralized and that is bitcoin," he said in an interview on the CoinDesk Markets Daily show. "These other projects all have the foundational strengths and ability towards a path to that level of decentralized ethos. This nationalization of digital assets might potentially weaken those efforts over time."
Read more: Why Litecoin Might Be the Next Crypto to Get Its ETF