The Bitcoin Beacon
The vote is the furthest a national bitcoin reserve has moved through Congress. It is also still a long way from law.
WASHINGTON — The House Financial Services Committee voted 28–21 on Wednesday to advance the American Reserve Modernization Act of 2026, sending the first strategic bitcoin reserve bill ever to clear a full House committee toward the floor.
No U.S. reserve proposal has traveled this far. Until now the idea lived in a stand-alone Senate bill and a March 2025 executive order that set up a reserve on paper but authorized no buying.
The measure would fold federally seized bitcoin and other digital assets into a Strategic Bitcoin Reserve and a separate Digital Asset Stockpile, both held at the Treasury, with a minimum 20-year hold on the bitcoin.
It goes further than housekeeping. The bill authorizes the Treasury to buy up to 200,000 bitcoin a year for five years — a path to a cumulative one million coins, roughly 5% of the 21 million that will ever exist.
A bill that clears a committee has momentum. A bill that commits public money to a million bitcoin has enemies.
The seized-coin core is politically cheap: it costs nothing new, since the government already holds the assets. The purchase authority is where the fight is.
Buying 200,000 coins a year means spending tens of billions of dollars of public money on an asset that fell below $76,000 this week. That is the line opponents on the committee pressed, and it is why prediction markets put the odds of the bill becoming law by 2027 in the single digits.
The lineage runs through Senator Cynthia Lummis's BITCOIN Act, first introduced in 2025, which proposed the same million-coin target funded partly by revaluing the Treasury's gold certificates. That bill stalled in the Senate.
The House version strips some of the funding mechanics and leans harder on seized assets, which is what let it survive a committee vote. The trade-off is that the more fundable a reserve looks, the smaller it gets.
While Washington argues, the states have been busy. At least 41 states and Puerto Rico introduced or advanced digital-asset legislation in the 2026 session, and a handful — Arizona, Utah and Texas among them — have passed their own reserve or holding measures.
That patchwork is the quiet story under the federal one: a national reserve may arrive not as a single act of Congress but as fifty smaller decisions that make the idea normal before it is law.
Why it matters: a committee vote turns the reserve from a slogan into a bill with a number attached — and the number, one million coins bought with public money, is exactly what keeps it from passing.
The 28–21 committee vote, the 200,000-coin annual purchase authority, the 20-year hold and the one-million-coin target are per The Crypto Times, KuCoin and Coinpedia (Sept 16–17, 2026); the BITCOIN Act lineage is per Congress.gov. The bill still requires a full House vote and Senate passage before becoming law. Informational only — not financial advice.
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