President Donald Trump on Thursday night authorized the creation of a strategic bitcoin reserve and a separate US stockpile of other digital assets, fulfilling a campaign promise he made to an industry that is gathering at the White House Friday for a “crypto summit.”

The bitcoin reserve will be seeded with bitcoin already owned by the federal government taken as part of criminal or civil asset forfeiture proceedings, Trump’s crypto czar David Sacks said in a post on the social media platform X.

"This means it will not cost taxpayers a dime," Sacks said. Trump in the Oval Office asked Sacks if he believed in the reserve and then before signing the executive order said "we made the promise" — referring to the pledge of a bitcoin reserve he made on the 2024 campaign trail.

Sacks said on X that the U.S. government owns an estimated 200,000 bitcoin (BTC-USD), although he said there has never been a complete audit. An executive order signed by Trump Thursday asks for a full accounting of the federal government’s digital asset holdings.

Sacks said the U.S. will not sell any bitcoin once it is in the reserve and that it will be kept as a store of value.

The reserve, he added, “is like a digital Fort Knox for the cryptocurrency often called ‘digital gold.’”

As to whether the US may buy more bitcoin to bolster the reserve, Sacks noted that the secretaries of Treasury and Commerce have the authorization “to develop budget-neutral strategies for acquiring additional bitcoin, provided that those strategies have no incremental costs on American taxpayers.”

Sen. Cynthia Lummis has separately discussed a US government crypto-buying program that would call for the Federal Reserve to purchase more bitcoin using 1970s-era certificates for gold reserves. It would need congressional approval.

"The goal of a strategic reserve is to buy or convert current assets into bitcoin and then hold them ... that way, we can remove the short-term volatility from the equation and look at this as a long-term strategic asset," she told Yahoo Finance Live in an interview last Friday.

Lummis said there is more work to do to help people understand “the reason why we should have it” and that it can interplay with the world reserve currency status of the US dollar.

"We think they are very complimentary," Lummis told Yahoo Finance.

When the president last weekend floated the idea of a reserve on social media, he said it would include bitcoin as well as other digital assets: ethereum (ETH), XRP (XRP), solana (SOL), and cardano (ADA).

Sacks said Thursday that the president had also authorized a "U.S. digital asset stockpile consisting of digital assets other than bitcoin forfeited in criminal or civil proceedings" — without naming the assets.

But Sacks made it clear the government will not acquire additional assets for that stockpile beyond those obtained through forfeiture proceedings.

The new announcement comes after a period of extreme volatility for digital assets. The price of bitcoin has whipsawed this week following its worst correction since a 2022 meltdown.

Last night it fell following the reserve announcement. Bitcoin is still down significantly from its all-time high above $109,000 on the day of Trump's inauguration in January.

The crypto world is hoping a White House crypto summit today will take it one step closer to getting even more it wants from a GOP-led Washington, providing some stability to a market trying to regain the upward momentum it had in the aftermath of Donald Trump’s election victory.

The SEC has dropped several high-profile cases against prominent cryptocurrency companies since Trump took office and created a a presidential working group on digital assets that is studying the possibility of moving legislation through Congress that could provide more clarity about regulatory oversight of digital assets.

The White House said in a statement that Trump is expected to host and deliver remarks at the crypto summit before prominent CEOs, founders, and investors from the industry.

The attendees are expected to include Coinbase Global (COIN) CEO Brian Armstrong, Strategy’s (MSTR) Michael Saylor, Chainlink Labs CEO Sergey Nazarov, and Exodus CEO JP Richardson.

The president is also participating in the cryptocurrency industry. Just before his inauguration, Trump's team launched an official meme coin for the 47th president (TRUMP) and one for first lady Melania Trump (MELANIA) on the solana blockchain.

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