Texas purchased $5M worth of BlackRock’s IBIT and has an additional $5 million for future purchases to establish a strategic BTC reserve.
Only Arizona and New Hampshire enacted similar laws, but were yet to officially announce BTC purchases.
Texas has jumped on the current discounted Bitcoin and funded the first U.S state strategic BTC reserve (SBR).
In a statement on the 25th of November, Lee Bratcher, President of the Texas Blockchain Council, announced that the state had purchased $5 million on the 20th of November. Texas has $10 million allocated for the reserve, meaning half of the budget remains undeployed for future buys.
Batcher added that the state scooped BTC at $87K via BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust (IBIT) and plans to self-custody their assets in the future.
The $10 million BTC allocation was the “initial funding” per the Texas Bitcoin [BTC] bill, and the budget cycle runs biennially (every two years).
Put differently, the remaining $5 million could be spent on another BTC purchase before the next state budget.
Texas was among the three U.S states that enacted a strategic BTC reserve bill. It enabled the establishment of a special fund, managed by the state comptroller, to invest in crypto assets with a market cap of at least $500 billion.
Arizona and New Hampshire also passed related SBR legislation, but had not made a public purchase as of press time.
Other U.S states that attempted such moves, like Ohio, were shot down immediately after being introduced in the chambers.
That said, at the national level, the U.S holds 326K BTC, worth $28 billion per current market prices.
The U.S added about 127K BTC in Q4, seized from anti-money laundering investigations. However, China contested this, claiming that it was the U.S. that hacked the LuBian mining pool.
On the global level, new players such as Abu Dhabi, the Czech Republic, and El Salvador have joined the OGs.
In fact, according to the UAE, BTC was considered a strategic reserve asset, similar to gold, and nearly tripled its holdings as of Q3.
That said, governments are now the third-largest BTC holders in the world, after ETFs and public companies.
Meanwhile, the increased appetite for BTC from new nation-state players could help reduce its pullbacks.
However, the $10M budget for two years, like the Texas case, isn’t comparable to the bidding from treasury firms like Strategy. Even so, both demand lines could boost BTC’s value in the long run.
