US Treasury’s Scott Bessent backpedals: Bitcoin buying still possible

2025-08-16 09:01:22 Primitive Reading

US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has clarified that his department is still exploring budget-neutral ways to buy Bitcoin for the Strategic Bitcoin Reserve — contrasting with his recent comments suggesting the plan was off the table, which triggered a Bitcoin sell-off.

“Treasury is committed to exploring budget-neutral pathways to acquire more Bitcoin to expand the reserve, and to execute on the President’s promise to make the United States the ‘Bitcoin superpower of the world,’” Bessent clarified in an X on Thursday.

He reiterated that the Bitcoin

BTC$118,961forfeited to the federal government would form the reserve’s foundation.There were already concerns that the US’s slow pace of executing its Strategic Bitcoin Reserve could leave it open to being front-run by other nation-states. Some feared that the Treasury may not even follow through on the strategy.

Around seven hours earlier on Thursday, Bessent’s comments to FOX Business were widely interpreted to mean the Treasury isn’t looking to buy Bitcoin.

“We’ve also started to get into the 21st century, a Bitcoin reserve. We’re not going to be buying that, but we are going to use confiscated assets and continue to build that up,” Bessent told the media outlet, which wiped nearly $55 billion off Bitcoin’s market cap within 40 minutes of his comments, with Bitcoin falling from $121,073 to $118,886, CoinGecko data shows.

Despite the clarification, Bitcoin is trading at $118,500 at the time of writing.

Bitcoin’s change in price over the last 24 hours. Source: CoinGecko

Less talk, more action, Bitcoin pundits say

While Bessent’s clarification reassured some Bitcoiners, others are still concerned that the US Treasury Department may not execute on its promise:

“Are you seriously still ‘exploring budget-neutral pathways’? At some point, exploration without execution starts to look like avoidance,” Bitcoin mining firm Braiins CEO Eli Nagar said on X.

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