A Czech Central Banker Still Wants Bitcoin in His Reserves

In February 2026 the Czech National Bank's board settled the question, or seemed to: bitcoin would not go into the country's foreign-exchange reserves. What makes Prague worth watching is that the man who lost the vote runs the bank. Governor Ales Michl has kept making the case in public ever since, and a sitting European central-bank chief openly arguing to buy bitcoin is itself the news — whatever his board decides.

Michl's pitch is conservative in form, radical in target. He frames a token allocation — on the order of 1% of reserves — not as a bet on price but as diversification: a small position that, in his telling, raises the expected return of the reserve portfolio without materially changing its overall risk measured in Czech koruna. He is careful never to call bitcoin money. He calls it an asset a prudent reserve manager might hold in a sliver, the way one holds gold.

The board said no

The bank board disagreed, and the decision was not close in effect: no bitcoin in official reserves. Earlier in the year the CNB had signaled it would at least study the asset class — explore custody, test the operational mechanics — and that exploratory posture survives. But study is not allocation, and Michl's preferred step did not command a majority among his own colleagues. He has treated the loss as a pause, not a verdict, continuing to speak on why diversification into bitcoin deserves a hearing.

He never calls bitcoin money. He calls it an asset a prudent reserve manager might hold in a sliver — the way one holds gold.

The rulebook hardens

He is making that argument into a stiffening regulatory wind. The European Union's Markets in Crypto-Assets regime, MiCA, reached a hard edge on July 1, 2026, when the Czech Republic's transitional grace period ended. From that date, a platform without a granted MiCA license cannot legally serve clients in the EU — the bloc's clearest signal yet that crypto will be permitted only inside a licensed perimeter. A central bank contemplating a bitcoin position and a union tightening the rules around bitcoin firms are, for now, moving in opposite directions.

Who else has the option

Prague is not alone in theory. Analysts note that five other EU member states share the derogation status that would let a national central bank run a Czech-style experiment without euro-area sign-off: Hungary, Poland, Romania, Sweden and Bulgaria. In practice none has moved. Poland's talk of a "strategic bitcoin reserve" has been campaign rhetoric more than policy, and the others have stayed quiet. That is what makes Michl unusual — not that the option exists, but that a governor keeps pressing it out loud.

Why it matters

Nation-state bitcoin has mostly meant seizures, mining or El Salvador's open-market buys. A reserve allocation debated on the record by a European central-bank governor is a different register entirely — the argument arriving in the one institution built to reject it. Michl has lost the vote and may lose it again. That the case is being made from the governor's chair, inside the EU's tightening perimeter, is the shift worth marking.

Editor's note: the CNB has not allocated to bitcoin; Governor Michl's remarks are advocacy, not bank policy. Roles verified as of publication. Nothing here is financial advice.