Bitcoin is struggling to find direction, with the bitcoin price dropping back from near $80,000 per bitcoin even as traders scramble to get ahead of a Federal Reserve update.
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The bitcoin price has swung wildly since hitting an all-time high of $126,000 in October, crashing to $60,000 before rebounding (partly thanks to an imminent $6.3 trillion Wall Street earthquake).
Now, after former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen issued a shock “hyperinflation” warning, the White House’s top crypto adviser, Patrick Witt, has teased a “big announcement” in the next few weeks on U.S. president Donald Trump’s strategic bitcoin reserve.
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U.S. president Donald Trump last year signed an executive order creating a bitcoin strategic reserve—though the bitcoin price dropped since then.
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“The president signed the strategic bitcoin reserve executive order last year, and we’ve gone to work in figuring out exactly the machinations necessary and legal interpretations that we need to get that right and solidify that and protect the digital assets, specifically bitcoin that we have on the government balance sheet,” Witt, the executive director of the president’s council of advisors for digital assets, said during a panel discussion at the Bitcoin 2026 conference in Las Vegas in widely reported comments.
The bitcoin reserve was seeded with the 200,000 bitcoin the government already held from criminal and civil asset forfeiture proceedings, with the executive order prohibiting its sale.
However, since Trump signed the executive order creating the bitcoin reserve and crypto stockpile there has been little movement on making either a reality, raising questions of whether they would actually happen.
The bitcoin price has dropped since the executive order was signed, highlighting the market’s lack of confidence in Trump’s ability to get the bitcoin reserve signed into law.
“I think we have a bit of a breakthrough there, and obviously that needs to be followed up with legislation,” Witt said. “In the meantime, we do believe we’re going to be able to take a big step forward from the executive branch side.”
Elsewhere at the conference, representative Nick Begich unveiled the reworked strategic bitcoin reserve bill under the name American Reserves Modernization Act (ARMA), which would see the government buy up to 1 million bitcoin over five years using budget-neutral strategies.
Last year, senator Cynthia Lummis and Begich introduced the “Boosting Innovation, Technology, and Competitiveness through Optimized Investment Nationwide Act,” then known as the Bitcoin Act, to Congress but failed to find traction.
“Why the renaming—because it’s so important for people both in Congress and across the nation to understand what we’re actually trying to do,” Begich, a Republican from Alaska, said in comments reported by The Block. “We’re trying to make sure that bitcoin is treated like the reserve asset that it is.”
Begich added that the bill, which has some updates, would help cement a strategic bitcoin reserve, warning that, “We don’t know what the next administration is going to be like …. you want to take the opportunity when you have it to lock in the gains that you experienced under one administration or another, and that’s where Congress can really act.”
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The bitcoin price has bounced since reaching recent lows of $60,000 per bitcoin.
Forbes Digital Assets
Meanwhile, billionaire bitcoin investor Tim Draper, who bought almost 30,000 bitcoin seized by the government from the shuttered Silk Road black market for just $632 per coin in 2014, told conference attendees that people who don’t own bitcoin should be scared, extending that warning to countries facing inflation or fiscal stress.
“You should be scared if you don’t own bitcoin,” Draper said in comments reported by conference organizer Bitcoin Magazine, adding that he’s telling people that without bitcoin exposure they “should be very, very worried.”
Earlier this month, former Federal Reserve chair Janet Yellen warned that Trump could be pushing the U.S. dollar toward “hyperinflation”—a situation some think could blow up the bitcoin price.
“How often does the president of a developed country express the view that the interest rate should be set to reduce the debt service cost,” Yellen, who served as Treasury secretary under president Joe Biden after her leadership of the Fed ended, said during a conference in Hong Kong, it was reported by the Financial Times.
“This is what you hear in a banana republic,” Yellen said, adding she had “never seen a threat of this level to the Fed before,” and that managing interest rates for the sake of the government budget has the potential to led to “hyperinflation.”
Trump has repeatedly pushed the Federal Reserve and its outgoing chair Jerome Powell to cut interest rates since he returned to the White House in 2024, hoping to cut the government’s spiraling borrowing costs on its near-$40 trillion debt pile.
“The U.S. government is never going to stop printing money,” Anthony Pompliano, the chief executive of bitcoin treasury company ProCap Financial who expects the bitcoin price to hit $1 million, said in an emailed note. “We spent over $100 billion on interest payments for the national debt last month.”